Chuyoung Lee, Associate Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
Visitors to the Seoul branch of National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea will be greeted by an enormous, self-radiant and slowly moving mechanical creature suspended from the high ceiling of its first basement. For its project whose objective is to feature site-specific installations that shed light on the distinctive spatial aspects of the Seoul Branch's interior and exterior spaces, the Museum has selected Choe U-Ram (1970- ) who has been drawing much attention for his remarkably imaginative and sophisticatedly produced animatronic creatures. Choe has been leading an active career as an artist in the domestic and international art scenes since his graduation from the Department of Sculpture, Chung-Ang University and its graduate school. The artist has succeeded in developing his own artistic style to materialize those fictitious creatures that have come into being by spontaneous generation in the depth of the dark shadow casted by the megacities in the times of high technology on the basis of his fictitious theories of archaeology and science.
In this project, the artist hung his Opertus Lunula Umbra (Hidden Shadow of the Moon), a massive animatronic creature whose height is five meters from the ceiling in front of Gallery 5, whose functionality can be characterized by its role as a sort of a hub by which the different buildings of the Seoul branch scattered like islands are connected and the visitors' movements are guided. A magnificent spectacle is created by the slow movements of tens of its huge symmetrical wings, which resemble the oars of a Viking ship. This work in the form of a colossal caterpillar emanating mysterious light is the latest version of the work of Choe for which viewers highly praised at the Liverpool Biennale in 2008 and in Pozna?, Poland in 2009. This recent work of his of technical perfection and structural precision is introduced for the first time at the Seoul branch.
Choe's creation of organically-structured animatronic beings, whose being is plausibly accepted only in science fiction films, necessitates both his own research on such fields as archeology, biology and robotics and his close collaborative working with experts from those areas and a skilled staff. These new life forms of Choe are designed in reference to the structures and habits of various kinds of plants, animals and insects and are constructed from an extensive variety of precision machine components, motors and electronic devices. Choe founded a fictitious international research institute called 'United Research of Anima Machine' to explore, investigate and document mechanical creatures who inhabit and propagate by spontaneous generation, like microorganisms, in the unknown space concealed by the extravagant shell of the current high technological civilization. Among the activities of the institute are the discovery of mechanical existences who created themselves out of all kinds of metals and machine parts such as motors and circuits and sustain themselves on electrical energy in mountains of industrial sludge and trash or new life forms accidently found in the present-day urban environments, giving scientific names to them, and making inferential reports on their behavioral patterns and habits. These activities have great similarity to the methods and processes employed by zoologists, botanists, archeologists or astronomers to search for, categorize and define unknown beings.
According to URAM, Opertus Lunula Umbra that has shown up at the Seoul branch is a new kind of life form that is found mostly in the vicinity of harbor cities. When the sun's rays radiate off of the moon's surface, certain light energy is generated and this radiated energy has an effect to amplify the human ability to fantasize. And this energy increases in its amount in areas surrounding water. Thus, as the amalgamation of the lunar energy, wind and human fantasy are facilitated in seashore cities, this new species are often seen in coastal cities. It is also reported that they are in various sizes and their anatomy shows the organic amalgamation of a wide range of nautical devices culled from both those sunken ships of the past and modern ones.
People of this high technology era lead a modern life(?) being surrounded by all sorts of precision mechanical devices. Is it possible for us to imagine a life without machines? Sometimes we cannot shake off the ominous presentiment that our lives are dominated by machines. This dormant anxiety manifests itself by certain dystopian illusions in which 'the self-awareness of machines' leads to the fall of the human race. Nevertheless, our present-day civilization is making every possible efforts to manufacture still smarter, more precise and more human-resembling machines. In the future not so far from the present unknown mechanical beings might be possibly discovered in the deepest darkness of the subway or in heaps of industrial by-products. If so, it will be an epochal moment when people will have no choice but to admit what URAM has stated has been true all along.
ange of nautical devices culled from both those sunken ships of the past and modern ones.
People of this high technology era lead a modern life(?) being surrounded by all sorts of precision mechanical devices. Is it possible for us to imagine a life without machines? Sometimes we cannot shake off the ominous presentiment that our lives are dominated by machines. This dormant anxiety manifests itself by certain dystopian illusions in which 'the self-awareness of machines' leads to the fall of the human race. Nevertheless, our present-day civilization is making every possible efforts to manufacture still smarter, more precise and more human-resembling machines. In the future not so far from the present unknown mechanical beings might be possibly discovered in the deepest darkness of the subway or in heaps of industrial by-products. If so, it will be an epochal moment when people will have no choice but to admit what URAM has stated has been true all along.
