Collecting Chamber

About the exhibition

Humans have a persistent desire for life, but at the same time long and dream of the way beyond. Things outside the present that we can’t control become a zone of awe and mystery, where the time of imagination and desire works. The traces of death and the afterlife across culture and history will imply it. The ornate burial accessories, the pattern on the tomb, the amulet on the body, stuffed and displayed animals and insects—the strange objects that humankind has obsessively drawn and preserved remind us that the mechanisms of life and death are necessarily on the same page. Jiwon Choi empathizes with those universal curiosities and questions and tries to describe them as a somewhat unique landscape in her world. The exhibition 《Collecting Chamber》 looks into the meaning of the objects collected in large and small chambers created by the artist. Choi said she often looks at the ornaments, ceramic dolls, old birdhouse-shaped clocks, and insects dried up on the windowsill in her closed room. These things have had life or imitate living creatures. Things that seem more real than alive beings are symbols that represent the fragileness and beauty of a fleeting life. Choi focuses on their shape and meaning, starting mysterious objects in a surreal space she constructed. Soon, Choi’s world begins to fill up with various fragments. Small bird sculptures, dolls dressed in silky clothes, moths and bees captured in colorful frames are still life or already dead, but they paradoxically