The Use Value of the “Core”: The Art and Fashion of Choi Chul-Yong
Choi Chul-Yong studied fashion design at the Domus Academy in Milan and has since gone on to work outside of his home country of Korea in various areas of fashion as an art director for European brands. He first began attracting media attention at home around 2011 and 2012, when he received awards at the 7th and 8th Samsung Fashion & Design Fund events. His reputation in the Korean art world grew in 2012 as he continued creating unique spatial and text- based artwork from a building that was vacated by the relocation of the Hongik University Elementary School to Mount Seongmi from its previous site on the university’s campus. In 2013, he presented an experimental process in exhibition format at the Ball Pool Hall, a project gallery at the Daelim Museum of Art in Seoul’s Hannam neighborhood. Bearing the title Deux Ombres (meaning “two shadows”), it showed clothing being structurally recreated from textiles under the theme of “all things that appear to be one are based on two.” During the 2010s, the Ball Pool Hall had a reputation for boasting the most fascinating, cutting-edge programming in terms of criticism and discourse, with experimental exhibitions focusing on design as well as visual arts. For his 2012 exhibition, Choi created a work that incorporated a recycling process, where school curtains (a common sight in abandoned schools) were collected and reattached to the walls, applying a text-based concept to each different classroom space. By presenting this alongside video art and performance work, he used an out-of-the-ordinary perspective to turn a familiar space on its head. This well-known setting was transformed into an odd, somewhat surrealistic space, altered into a kind of imaginative environment. At the Ball Pool Hall in 2013, Choi collaborated with Kim Kwon-Jin, Kim Do- Hyung, An Mano, Oh Jung-Taek, and others to present fashion where the visual hybrids of the 2010s were shared in installation format.
To properly appreciate Choi Chul-Yong’s current solo exhibition, which opens at Space21 in May 2024, it is useful in several respects to understand the artistic perspective informing his experiments on the boundaries of fashion and art. His sui generis outlook on objects and texts has been a major influence on not only his fashion but also his artistic creations. In both his painting- based work and installations, he has offered new twists on elements internal to fashion, transforming them from an artistic perspective. Here is where Choi Chul-Yong’s unique critical process comes into play, as an artist rather than as a fashion designer. When he designs clothes, it is not simply as items to wear; he is presenting a process that encourages us to look closely into the processes of structures and ideas represented through clothing and fashion. He shares a complementary relationship, where clothing exists as a proxy or supplement showing the image surrounding someone and their associations with the texts that they enjoy.
In this exhibition, what Choi Chul-Yong presents as a fashion designer/ artist are uniforms for miners. While the focus is on presenting miners, Choi also spent the pandemic period creating two-dimensional blends of painting and silkscreening while concentrating not only on miners but also portraits of indigenous Americans and the Milanese women whom he observed while working in the city. Why should the miner series have served as such a crucial starting point in his artistic work? After studying fashion in Milan, Choi went to work at Meltin’pot, an Italian fashion house, and took on a project that involved designing uniforms for miners. He was also tasked with another project in 2008 for Wrangler Bluebell—relaunched by Wrangler Europe for the first time in 104 years—where he was redesigning the mining uniforms first presented in 1904.
A uniform offers one of the most effective illustrations of a group’s collective identity. But because Choi also had to design outfits for those tasked with the labor of mining, he was obliged to emphasize the clothing’s functional aspects as well. As someone who pursues research-based fashion, he started by seeking out a vast miners’ archive, establishing the perspective of fashion that would incorporate functionality while existing as a single image. Another element here was the use of practical design to underscore the meaning of the uniform as a symbol of intensive labor. He discovered the base materials for this solo exhibition during this period by examining a vast archive of the uniforms worn by miners between the 1890s and the 1910s. While the many archival materials and photographs that Choi saw in Italy were a great help in developing his mining uniforms, they also led him to ponder the essence of fashion and identity. He saw the uniform as the result of a form of replication, much like the repeated printing of plates in silkscreening and other approaches. In the photographs, he saw miners whose uniforms were stained with coal or with traces of food that they had eaten while wearing them. He sensed how all the different aspects of those people’s arduous situation and lives were inscribed on their outfits, so that the clothes they wore ultimately became—in the words of Roland Barthes—non-coded messages, showing the acts of labor they performed and the marks and situations associated with their lives.
Without these marks, the archival materials that Choi observed and analyzed in Italy would have been mere typological photographs, without a trace of the miners’ individuality. In his reinterpretation, he emphasized not the collectiveness exemplified by the uniforms that they wore but their presence as people with energy, vitality, and unique personas, based on their individual portraits and group images. The question of who specifically was portrayed in any one portrait was not important; what mattered was the question of what meanings were conceptually conveyed in these miner portraits. Through allegorical portraits, Choi transformed the collective images of miners into a collection of individuals replete with individual stories. It is a process onto which his unique artistic imagination was brought to bear. A portrait consisting of silkscreen dots was entitled [Orlo, Cavallo, Struttura (Edge, Horse, Structure, 2021)]. A green image of a face was entitled [Grande, Connettività, Esistenza (Big, Connectivity, Existence, 2021)]. A portrait showing its subject in a red jacket was called Fondamentale, [Complessità, Collegamento (Fundamental, Complexity, Connection, 2021)]. A man with an orange face in a green uniform was portrayed in [Ricorsivo, Ideale, Sensibilità (Recursive, Ideal, Sensibility, 2021)]. Figures in polka-dot jackets were shown in [Multiplice, Disordinato, Sistema (Multiple, Disordered, System, 2021)]. These works and others—[Tipico, Formativo, Evoluzione (Typical, Formative, Evolution, 2022)], [Sofisticato, Stava Picchiando, Voce (Sophisticated, Throbbed, Voice, 2022)], [Flessibile, Collettivo, Mito (Flexible, Collective, Myth, 2022)], [Pietra, Pianoforte, Possibilità (Stone, Piano, Possibility, 2022)], and [Acqua, dati, relazione (Water, Data, Relationship, 2022)] showed the interactions of fragmented texts appearing amid the images of miners.
The miner images and texts provide a conceptual map of Choi Chul-Yong’s artistic process. Starting with three words, he presents images of miners that evoke them, connecting them with miner portraits that are associated with the jackets, helmets, and colors the miners will be wearing. The titles of his works are texts consisting of nouns and adjectives, which show the relationships in the images along with keywords that the artist associated with particular figures. His choice for the titles is to simply enumerate the texts, eliminating preconceptions about portrait painting while leaving room for interpretation with open terms that the viewer is free to imagine. The most ambitious of the exhibition’s works are the large-scale portrait series [Sovrapposizione, Centrale, Armoniosa (Superpositioning, Central, Harmonious, 2021)] and [Core Workers (2022)], which reflect Choi’s distinctive perspective in expressing the essence of labor.
All of these portraits operate within the overall “Core” theme that Choi presents. The aesthetic significance here is reflected in the pictorial values of the portraits showing miners as groups and individuals. Through the aesthetic concept of the “Core,” he draws connections between the elements surrounding these portraits—society, labor, the environment—and everyday symbols. As his “Core” manifesto states, this is a device for visualizing core information: “The core is in the core; The core is with all objects; There is a core underneath the core” In this core information visualization device, all the elements have individual aspects, but they are not positioned in a top-to-bottom vertical hierarchy; rather, all the individual elements exist as a single “Core.” Instead of a relationship of tension between the core’s center and periphery—the presence of power relations or hierarchies— the values of the core are ones in which individual differences are acknowledged in an existential sense and operate together with the “Core” as another entity. To represent these values, Choi has produced “Core Boxes”: text boxes emblazoned with 250 core embroideries. Painstakingly embroidered by the artist for this exhibition, the core boxes are arranged as interconnected yet individual entities. Yet what the embroideries signify is not manual labor but post-industrialization technology that has been replaced with mechanical embroidering. If the uniform is taken to symbolize uniformly applied replication rather than the expression of a person’s individuality and specificity, Choi’s approach is to use the “Core” values and the individualized jackets and colors of miners to show the personas, individuality, and presence of particular people, which have been excised or covered up amid the replication. In effect, their expressions and individuality express their orientation by means of the different jackets they wear.
The installation approach and core values in this work intersect in fascinating ways with the various themes that the artist has presented as fashion concepts through the Cy Choi identity. Looking at his conceptualized fashion shows, we see concepts such as “Cut-out + Boundary,” “Connotation,” and “Image.” In the case of “Connotation,” the post-structuralist Roland Barthes’s explanation of his own semiotics used the term to refer to the hidden implied meanings in a culture— the inherent meanings through which a given sign or object illustrates the hidden significance present at the culture’s base. It differs in nature from the denotative meanings that are outwardly visible.
Choi’s latest solo exhibition also offers a glimpse at the specific images and texts that he has treated as a fashion philosophy. In particular, he shares his philosophy under the title “Inosculation,” which is a term he has presented as a fashion concept. It is similar in approach to his concepts proposing the combination and layering of differing characteristics through the blending of different types of things. By revealing the multilayered meanings concealed behind the surface-level meanings of texts and cultural codes, this conceptual approach introduces new meaning to outfits and texts by way of a process of negation and deconstruction that strips away fashion’s original role and repositions it.
Artistically, Choi makes active use of détournement processes like those of the international situationist Guy Deboard, making use of pre-existing elements in a way that creates new aesthetic values. A fashion designer views discarded or used fabric not as garbage to be thrown away, but as something that can be reused by someone as a new visual or structural element. In terms of the environment and sustainability, this has emerged as a major issue not only in fashion but also in contemporary art. The external banner for this exhibition repurposes a banner from a previous exhibition, which has been repainted and textualized with an “X” symbolizing the core. It also incorporates used cigar box to show a process of freely rendering different images of individuals and groups.
In contrast with the large miner portraits, the small portraits on cigar box are typical yet disparate and diverse, like the archives that the artist viewed in the past. They are somewhat improvisational and sometimes playful as they show moments of visual inspiration and documentation—minor members of society pleasantly living their lives. They are core workers in society as much as the miners are, intertwined in complex, rhizomatic ways with other beings as in the core diagram. At the same time, they wear the same “Core Jackets,” as the miners as they work together, going about their daily lives as they occupy everyday spaces that are connected in an overlapping structure with all beings. To the artist, the “Core” has a utility value at the material level, existing as a critical and aesthetic value that cuts across and expands the boundary between fashion and art.
Yeon Shim Chung (Professor of Art History & Theory in Hong Ik Univ.)
