Namwon Choi | Blue Distant

Exhibition Dates: October 25 - November 30, 2019

Sandler Hudson Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural one-person exhibition for Namwon Choi entitled Blue Distant. As a Korean immigrant living and creating in America, Choi perceives herself as being in a constant state of perpetual motion. Attempting to bridge the gap between her simultaneous feelings of affiliation and alienation, the artist focuses on the notion of migrancy when addressing her subject matter, relating its temporal condition to her own personal disposition. In privileging movement over fixity in space and time, Choi is able to promote procession and engage in action as she navigates relocation and the condition of in-betweenness. 

In Blue Distant, the artist combines traditional Korean painting in rendition of a network of spacial yet forgettable highways, essentially connecting the new to an older art form. For Choi, a highway signifies the span of time between a departure from one location and the arrival in another, and it is then reinterpreted as an interval in which she can freely discover her identity within the constraints of two cultures. In turn, monochromatic fragments of each painting react alongside integrated scenery installation works so that they may create an experiential narrative of the in-between in fuller view. With Blue Distant, Choi constructs a physical representation of the migration space itself while showcasing a life lived in transition.

N A M W O N   C H O I   is an artist based in Savannah, GA. Choi acquired her BFA and MFA in Traditional Korean Painting from Hongik University in Seoul, Korea in 2002, and her MFA in Drawing and Painting at Georgia State University in Atlanta in 2014. Her work has been exhibited at the New York City Korean Culture Center, the Los Angeles Korean Culture Center, Aqua Art Miami, the National MFA Wet Paint Biennial Exhibition in Chicago, and at The Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia in Atlanta.  Her work in the New Connections exhibition at the Korean Cultural Center in Washington D.C. was reviewed in the Washington Post.  Her recent solo exhibition In-Betweenness showed at Gallery 72 in Atlanta, Georgia; Open Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee; and Artist Homes Gallery in Berlin, Germany. She is currently a professor of Foundation Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design.