Yun Choi, The Lounge

A proposal and text by Oriane Emery & Jean-Rodolphe Petter

CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute invites Korean artist Yun Choi (KR, 1989) for her first exhibition in Switzerland. Her work has been shown extensively, including in Seoul, New York, London, Hamburg, and Buenos Aires. She traces the collective beliefs and shared reveries that underpin absurd sociopolitical phenomena. Her practice engages with the hybrid temporality of contemporary society, which often appears in her work through multi-bodied beings that manifest contemporary psyche. Yun Choi navigates these flows through video works and multimedia installations. Moving image plays an important role in her practice, though not an omnipresent one, as in the exhibition presented here, titled “The Lounge.”

A lounge is a non-place (a space in which we transit without forming social bonds), designed for rest or waiting, but not as a destination in itself. These environments reflect a particular temporality. Time seems suspended, lacking consistency. The décor is shaped by a popular idea of waiting or “rest.” Yet most users pay little attention to it, entering instead into a spacetime in which movement, from an external perspective, appears stretched. It is simultaneously a screen and a form of distance — much like areas where smoking is permitted. One witnesses a scene that is both close and distant. It is from this idea, in relation to the architecture of CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute, that the artist conceived two distinct yet connected zones: the exhibition space, where these bodies seem frozen in time or, conversely, move so quickly that they escape visual perception; and the Café du Loup, which remains lively, warm, and familial.

Two series are presented, both conceived specifically for CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute: the first, pictorial in nature, appearing on the French windows of the exhibition space and on the three metal plates to the right upon entering; the second, sculptural, composed mainly of wood and ceramics. Both series were initiated during the artist’s residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam between 2021 and 2023. The decision to present these works is closely linked to the social and geographical situation of the exhibition site: its direct interaction with the Café du Loup, its location within an eco-district, and, more broadly, the Swiss context. Nature is more underlying than overtly present in the artist’s practice. Here, however, the neighbourhood and the country’s landscape configuration prompted Yun Choi to reveal it more explicitly through this new body of work.

It is difficult to determine where these bodies distributed throughout the space come from, or even the nature of their actions. Young or old, from the past or the future, human or non-human… these questions are intentionally left unanswered by the artist. Each viewer shapes their own interpretation. This series of sculptures also interrogates the eco-district itself. The wood used was collected from a backyard just before it was paved over for the construction of new housing on the outskirts of Amsterdam. A different geography, yet a similar context to the Plaines-du-Loup and the development of the site we stand in. What future awaits such places?

These bodies, as the artist calls them, are at once relics of the past and unknown hybrid beings. They also echo ancient myths of tree transformation. Composed of natural elements, they bear ceramic features and attributes. The connection to earth is strong — and to fire as well, through the firing of clay that brings this material into being. They resonate with animist thought and shamanism, still practiced in hybrid forms in Korea. Like ancient trees regarded as patron saints or powerful spirits, these beings also reflect the kind of relationship we project onto nature as humans. This knowledge is embodied metaphorically through the face of the grandmother figure, cast from a latex mask.

Finally, there are the metal paintings and the works that cover the glass doors of the exhibition space. They are both abstract and, through the oil-painted impressions left on their surfaces, evoke variations of aquatic motifs and the mountain peaks found in traditional Korean landscapes known as Sansu (“mountain and water”). One of the key works to which Yun Choi likes to refer, due to its immense popularity, is Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land by An Gyeon (1447). However, the artist departs significantly from the traditional model to reflect the era in which she lives, in connection with the notion of “confusion” that runs throughout her practice. These motifs, which we might associate—through ethnocentric reflex—with modern European abstract painting, also represent the spread of black fungi: mould forming in the ageing and working-class homes of Seoul as a result of pervasive humidity.

Between nostalgia and melancholy, Yun Choi undertakes a profound reflection on our visions of an ideal society, revealing its fissures and scars, its mechanisms — in short, the reverse side of the picture.

The project “The Lounge” was made possible thanks to the generous support of the City of Lausanne, Pro Helvetia, Loterie Romande, Stichting Stokroos, the Canton of Vaud, the Leenaards Foundation, and the Françoise Champoud Foundation.