Sung Rok Choi

Sung Rok Choi has explored the contemporary scenes and narratives
that have been generated by technology from digital animations and video projects. He also looks at the digitalized world and continues to explore how humans are perceived, and focuses on the changes in relationships between developing technology and humans. His recent solo exhibitions include Great Chain of Being (Gallery Chosun, Seoul, 2019), Operation Mole/ Final Stand (SeMA Bunker, Seoul, 2018), Flow Seoul Move (Seoullo Media Canvas, Seoul, 2015), Savior’s Road (Space XX, Seoul, 2016), The Height of Phantom (Gallery Chosun, Seoul, 2015), and Where We Stand (Art Center Nabi, Seoul, 2016). He also participated in the exhibitions such as Paradise Art Lab Festival (Paradise City Art Space, Incheon, 2020), Collect for All (Seoul Museum of Art, 2020), Viborg Animation Festival (Viborg, Denmark, 2019), Nature, Life, Human (Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, 2019), Flip Book: The Revolutionary Animations of the 21st Century (Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, 2018), and Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria, 2017).

We humans living in contemporary society exist in a time and space where reality and virtuality have been conflated while we deal with the restrictions of physical distance among humans, which an unprecedented pandemic era has brought about, and the vicarious existences that have been subsequently transferred to be digitally visible. This work started from the question where the senses that we perceive from the online and offline worlds through the eyes stem from towards the people living in the pandemic era, who float in the simulation space that replaces the virtual currency and reality and observe such a phenomenon. This work pertains to the starting point of the landscape we look at and the space we perceive in the time when the images and stories, which have been created by pointillism consisting of the data on the digital screen, replace everything in reality.
As a site-specific media façade, Genesis Canyon is an animation projection project that would be projected on the outside space of the Asia Culture Center (ACC). The ACC is considered to be a space where art can be created, and people can experience any unexpected senses that are rarely anticipated in daily life. The media façade installation project at the ACC has been set as a screen that can connect the wall and floor in reality to a virtual space, and accordingly, a virtual landscape where the atmosphere of the space with the slope-structured road and the surrounding trees can be related to this
screen has been conceived. Also, a mythological scene that may well appear in the myth of creation has been represented. In the myth of creation, the starting point of the world was found at the topography of the canyon, and this point has been connected to the exhibition space structure of the ACC to present a space where a new creation myth begins. The expressions of the moving objects in the scene are associated with the idea of life and movements that can be displayed in Animism, which in turn is linked to shamanism that has assigned the unique expressions and movement on the lives of the objects.
This project has been produced in the 3D space of the structure of the ACC exhibition space. The scenes created in this canyon were presented as the movements of light, wind, lava, and water through the computer simulation. The simulated scenes have been rendered from the two viewpoints and projected onto the wall and the floor, making the viewers experience the media space specific to the site where the real and virtual spaces are conflated. In this project, every object and movement has produced virtual movements that can be created by a number of computational calculations, such as the real size and physical elements—gravity, the features of water and lava, etc., as if they existed in the actual exhibition hall. This is similar to how the people in contemporary society experience virtual objects from the screen and replace the object in reality.
The main attempts of the work lie in the thoughts on the visual sense that can be experienced through looking at the landscape in the real world, the sense that we encounter while moving in space, the sense that we feel by looking at the movements of the objects, and what kinds of senses can be made if these senses were virtually created and represented in a real space. I wonder which experiences the viewers would go through when such visual stimulations and movements are created in the virtual space and again embodied in the real space. It’s like that they were viewing a kind of visual fantasy that started in a movie theater, where people experience moving images recorded by light, in real outside space. When it happens, which sense would the viewers experience? This media façade has been created to allow the viewers to engage in experiences while they move around so that they can undergo the visual fantasy in the outside space rather than inside ones such as movie theaters or galleries. To that end, the compositions of the scenes, the movements of the elements inside the screen, the speed of the viewpoints, and the screen size, among others, have been considered.

This work consists of three stories.
The first scene of “The Hand of Ether” is related to the ether, a type of air or fundamental element consisting of this world from the perspective of philosophers in the past. It also pertains to the meaning of Ethereum, a kind of virtual currency today. The scene shows the hand of a creator who formulates a certain world and value in a void space. Here lightning implies electricity, air does data, and earth does a type of platform where we experience reality and virtuality. The screen, one of the most important spaces where we live in contemporary society and experience the world, comprises of the elements of electricity, data, and a screen, and such a scene serves as a metaphor for a point from which we start experiencing the inside of the virtual world.
The second scene depicts “The Existence of Lava.” By personalizing the substance that holds the materiality of both a liquid and solid, the process of creating the elements of this world is represented by the dancing lava character. This is a story of fire which, as a substance, creates some sort of will of the spirit and of the existence of lava which establishes the structure of the world. It was inspired by the scene of lava that appears in Fantasia, an animation film from Disney’s early years.
The third scene, “The Spring of Life,” displays a scene in which the canyon created by the lava dances brings birth to the fall and waterfalls along the canyon. In this set, water with the aspect of a flowing substance is presented as living life, and it is a primitive scene where plants and animals that are conceived around water coexist.
These scenes intend to form the story of light, water, and fire, providing the primitive sense that emerges as we perceive the world.