Choi Min (1944-2018) was a poet, a translator, an art critic and an educator who devoted his life to mediating the arts through diverse activities. Familiar to us as the translator of Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art and John Berger‘s Ways of Seeing, and as a founding member of the art movement group “Reality and Utterance,” he was a mediator between literature and art, art and video, art and society, art and the public, expanding the fields of visual culture, and his work carries great significance.
The Choi Min Collection consists of 161 artworks and 24,924 other materials that he collected during his life, all of which were donated to the Seoul Museum of Art in 2019-2020. The materials, including 21,000 books, match the scale of an entire library. The charming potential of this collection is that by traversing different ages, languages and fields, it serves as a catalyst that can promote diverse approaches and interpretations transcending art itself. But at the same time, it also presents a challenge: while the books definitely influenced him as background for his thoughts, their effect was indirect, and it is hard to prove any direct causal relationship. Therefore, in order to grasp and understand these materials, active research is essential to determine their relationship to Choi.
This exhibition has been composed on the basis of findings through research on the Choi Min Collection, conducted for more than a year by researchers from diverse fields including art, cinema, literature and bibliography. The participating researchers carefully followed and explored contexts in the materials, accumulated during this one person’s lifetime, while also considering them from the newer perspective of today. The exhibition presents their interpretations and evaluations of the various inflection points in Choi Min’s life, as his thoughts and writings extend to art and again to image and cinema, attempting to illuminate their significance. In addition, the show will feature commission works by various artists who have translated and interpreted the senses evoked by the Choi Min Collection into photographic and video language, and selected materials through which spectators can glimpse aspects of Choi that were previously unknown.
“Cheerful Learning, Delightful Knowledge, Joyful Knowing” was a memo that Choi left in one of his books―the French edition of The Gay Science. Like Nietzsche’s aphorism, which encourages intellectual courage, it serves as a metaphor for Choi Min, who transcended the borders between rigid times, discourses and media to open the future for the world of images through free and flexible thinking. We hope that this exhibition will be an arena for delightful sharing of the fascinating knowledge that Choi passes on to the next generations.
The event will take place in five locations. An overview of the Choi Min Collection, Theme-Based Research presenting results of in-depth research and interpretation of the materials, and works by Hong Goo Kang, Jaeyeon Kim & Sunho Nam, Eun Chun, Jiin Juen, and Minseung Jang, who have expressed their explorations on Choi Min and his collection through photography, video and installation, can be seen in Gallery 1 and 2 of the Collaborating Space, the Exchanging Space, and the Learning Space, while the Research Lab will exhibit historical materials exploring the relation between image and narrative among the Collection. Specialists in the fields of classical literature, bibliography, urban research, comparative literature, art history and cinema will participate in film screening programs, archive workshops, and special local culture lectures, serving as guides for the Collection, which itself is a testimony to this diverse research adventure crossing over the borders of discipline, language and culture.
