"Live on, for such as you are!"

Choi Juwon, Choi Juwon Collection Exhibition
(Onsugongan, April 5–11, 2023)

Dulgi, Setjwi, Meokbo, Duck, Duck-Rat, the portraits of rats in bas-relief on dumpling- and egg-shaped panels of slowly melting time, pizza-saver pizza, egg sushi, hard bread, soft bread, the bread-rat, rats with a whole range of expressions, and among them, that one rat alone that will make your head bow almost involuntarily...

Until quite recently, all of these lived pressed up against, in front of, behind, under, and on top of other items from Choi Juwon’s collection: screws and nails, doorknobs, oddly shaped hinges, light things, heavy things, things that can be folded or crumpled, things that kick up dust, unsorted bolts and nuts, scraps of Styrofoam left over from carving something down, random shards of plywood and linen, endlessly battered and re-erected plinths, and piles of smashed partition walls salvaged from exhibitions that had just been torn down.

Even amid sharply rising prices and relentless pressure from rent, the fact that these works have stubbornly held their ground for over a decade under the vague promise of “future usefulness” already seems reason enough to honor them. Above all, since “Choi Juwon’s collection” has always also meant these and those gathered assemblages of countless objects forgotten in the dust pit of memory, it would be a shame to dismiss this simply as the story of “a guy who kept making and stockpiling things that never had a chance to be seen.”

To some people, this may just look like the story of someone who’s bad at throwing things away. That’s not exactly wrong, but it’s certainly not enough. For a maker, “trash” means something slightly different. The very moment you decide to toss something out, it keeps getting plugged into all the other possible lives it might have led in some other possible world—and in doing so, it ceases to be trash and becomes something else, in a continuous process of transformation. Since we can never really know what kind of former life an object unearthed today might have led, becoming trash isn’t only about the prejudice that divides useful from useless; it is, just as much, the gesture of mind that separates some things off as “works” and others as “waste.”

And each time you realize that the power of life and death over these not-yet-fulfilled object-lives lying before you rests entirely in your own hands, the poor artist’s body becomes one that shudders not at the usefulness of things, but at their uselessness. In this way, we learn with our hands, not as theory, that once an object starts living its own life, there is no way to stop that life.

We could even say that the moment an object loses its use, its real life begins. Of course, that’s not really true. We, too, want things that work, things that can be used! The problem is always the same: those objects whose present existence is stubbornly insisted upon, using their future potential to become something else as collateral, have piled up and layered over one another in the most outlandish ways on those infamous shelves—those stacked and overloaded surfaces—and on the tiny patch of ground they occupy.

The display cabinet with its peeling vinyl finish, the rusty metal cabinet, the anonymous structures that function as shelves, the old and weathered modular racks—all of them have, over many years, proved the best solidity they could manage within their limits, and in return, we know they have rightfully secured their place. We also know this: once something makes it onto a shelf, it retreats into the background and begins a life that is almost eternal.

Yet shelves tend to receive less attention than the objects on them. It’s a bit like how it’s easy to single out an individual as the cause of some event, but much harder to perceive how the underlying system is operating. I hope there will be another opportunity in the future to speak more fully about this problem.

For this collection exhibition, in the spirit of respecting social norms and ensuring viewing comfort, objects with excessively open futures—massive desks, children’s chairs, language-lab cassette players, broken radios, not-broken radios, the beer and soju glasses left behind by the “’70s–’80s Paldoangsan Club,” rusty pliers and long-nose pliers, female and male screw threads, saddles, and of course the offcuts of insulation foam and the 20m² of artificial grass once used for an outdoor installation—have been left out. These will be examined in greater depth through a future research project on the Choi Juwon Collection and presented at a later date.

P.S.
Artist Choi Juwon has been tirelessly recording those delusions that, for real-world / economic / ethical reasons, can hardly ever be turned into actual works, through a peculiar kind of writing he insists on calling short stories. Thanks to that passion, he has played a major role in the founding and flourishing of our Rat Society—as an editorial board member and comrade-in-mischief—and I would like to take this occasion to thank him publicly.

Since his writing and his artistic practice are deeply intertwined in many ways, if you’ve enjoyed this collection exhibition, I highly recommend visiting his blog, “Fart Written in Words” (글로 쓴 방귀, fart-writing.postype.com).

From the middle of a gently warm spring in 2023,
with congratulations,

from the Ratjournal