Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Choi Young Wook is not just another lunar jar painter. He is a Zen monk disguised as a businessman, a cartographer of the human soul who has chosen as his medium the humblest of Korean ceramics. While you marvel at the conceptual scribbles of the latest biennale, this man has been tracing microscopic lines on white surfaces for twenty years, like a happy Sisyphus who has traded his rock for a brush.
Attention, I will not serve you the usual speech about the pure beauty of Joseon ceramics or the aesthetics of emptiness. No. What is happening in the Paju workshop is much more radical. Choi Young Wook practices what I would readily call an obsessive minimalism that would make Sol LeWitt look like an exuberant baroque artist. His canvases ? Almost invisible monochromes where only a trained eye will distinguish a jar from a simple white background. It is almost insulting to the viewer accustomed to being caressed in the direction of the hair.
The artist spends ten hours a day tracing capillary lines on his canvases, repeating the same gesture thousands of times like a mad calligrapher who has forgotten the characters. These famous lines that he calls “karma” are supposed to represent our life paths that cross and separate. Charming. Except that by multiplying them, Choi Young Wook creates something much more interesting than a new age metaphor: a visual texture so dense that it becomes almost tactile. The eye gets lost in this labyrinth of imaginary cracks, desperately seeking an anchor point in this quasi-monochromatic white on white.
Western collectors love it, of course. Bill Gates bought three pieces at once for his foundation. But let’s not be mistaken. Behind the apparent commercial ease of these works hides a conceptual radicality that has nothing to envy to the American minimalists of the 60s.
In the catalog of the history of contemporary South Korean art, the arrival in the 70s of the Dansaekhwa movement marked a turning point [1]. These artists, including Park Seo-Bo and Chung Sang-Hwa, developed a practice of monochromatic painting based on the repetition of simple and meditative gestures. Choi Young Wook follows in this lineage, but he pushes it to its limits. Where the masters of Dansaekhwa sought the effacement of the self in the creative process, Choi claims to project his autobiography into each line he draws.
“I tell the story of my life,” he proclaims. But what life can fit into these intertwined lines that all look the same ? That’s precisely where his work becomes interesting. By endlessly repeating the same pattern, by infinitely varying the micro-details of his cracks, Choi confronts us with our own perception of time and repetition. His canvases function like minimalist Rorschach tests: some see mountains, others see waves, still others see constellations. The viewer projects their own obsessions onto these almost virgin surfaces.
This projective dimension is not unlike the experiments conducted in the 60s by the Op Art movement. Bridget Riley, in particular, explored how repetitive geometric patterns could create optical illusions and physical sensations in the viewer [2]. But where Riley sought spectacular effect, Choi cultivates the imperceptible. His works require a period of adaptation, an accustoming of the eye that must learn to distinguish the subtle variations in what at first seems uniform.
The creative process itself is worth dwelling on. Choi begins by tracing circles in pencil on his canvas, seeking the perfect shape of his imaginary jar. Then comes the application of successive layers of material, a mixture of gesso and white stone powder that he endlessly sands. This technique is not unlike the practices of certain Italian Renaissance painters, who prepared their panels with maniacal care to obtain perfectly smooth surfaces. But unlike them, Choi does not seek to create the illusion of depth. On the contrary, he deliberately flattens the pictorial space, creating a tension between the suggested three-dimensionality of the jar and the radical flatness of its representation.
In his recent works, the artist pushes this logic even further. The “Black & White” series presents jars that almost entirely disappear, absorbed by darkness or light. Only the lines remain, floating in an indeterminate space like abstract musical scores. One thinks of Rothko’s last works, those black rectangles that seemed to draw the gaze into their bottomless depth. But where Rothko sought tragic sublimity, Choi cultivates a disturbing serenity.
The 2020 exhibition at the Helen J Gallery in Los Angeles marked a turning point. For the first time, Choi presented works where the jar was no more than a pretext, enlarged fragments of ceramic surface where the cracks became the main subject. These abstract canvases reveal the true nature of his project: not to represent objects, but to map mental states, flows of consciousness materialized in networks of lines.
We must also note the strange temporal coincidence of his work. Choi began painting lunar jars in 2005, precisely at the moment when the South Korean art market was exploding on the international scene. Coincidence or calculation ? The artist claims to have been struck by a quasi-mystical revelation before a jar at the Metropolitan Museum. So be it. But we cannot help but notice that his choice of such an identifiably Korean motif comes just in time to ride the hallyu wave.
This ambiguity between spiritual sincerity and commercial opportunism runs through his entire work. Choi presents himself as an ascetic, spending his days in the solitude of his studio meditating by tracing lines. But he also multiplies his participations in international fairs, from Miami to Hong Kong. This double identity is not necessarily contradictory. It rather reflects the condition of the contemporary artist, torn between inner demand and market necessities.
We can compare this approach to the work done by Agnes Martin in the 1960s and 1970s. Martin also traced repetitive lines on monochromatic canvases, seeking to achieve a state of meditative purity [3]. Martin also claimed to paint not what she saw but what she felt. The difference is that Martin sought the universal while Choi claims the particular. His jars are Korean, his lines are autobiographical. Paradoxically, this is perhaps what makes his work more contemporary: the time for great universal abstractions is over, now is the time for fragmented identity narratives.
The generic title of his works, “Karma”, is particularly interesting. Karma, in Buddhist thought, designates the law of causality that governs our successive existences. Our present actions determine our future lives, in an infinite chain of causes and effects. Applied to art, this concept takes on a particular resonance. Is each line traced by Choi the consequence of a previous line ? Is each painting the karmic result of previous paintings ?
This reading makes his work a potentially infinite “work in progress”, a series of variations on a single theme that will find its resolution only with the death of the artist. It is both grandiose and derisory. Grandiose because it inscribes his practice in a temporality that exceeds the human scale. Derisory because, in the end, what does it change whether he paints a hundred or a thousand lunar jars ? The gesture remains the same, obsessive and vain.
But it is precisely this assumed vanity that gives strength to Choi’s work. In a world of art obsessed with novelty and innovation, he makes the bet of repetition. In an era saturated with images, he offers almost empty surfaces. In a market that values the spectacular, he cultivates the imperceptible. It is either very intelligent or completely stupid. Probably both at the same time.
The artist himself seems aware of this ambiguity. “I am not drawing a lunar jar”, he insists. A subtle nuance that reveals the full performative dimension of his work. Choi does not paint objects, he stages his own transformation into an object. It is conceptual body art, if you will, except that the body has disappeared, replaced by these thousands of lines that are like the digital traces of an absent presence.
In the pantheon of contemporary art, where to place Choi Young Wook ? Certainly not on the side of the provocateurs or the transgressors. His art is too polite, too well-behaved for that. But not on the side of the academic conservatives either. His radicality is elsewhere, in this manic obstinacy to always dig the same furrow, to always explore the same territory to exhaustion.
We think of course of Roman Opałka who spent his life painting numbers in increasing sequence on ever lighter canvases [4]. Or of On Kawara, who painted the date of the day on a monochromatic canvas every day. These conceptual artists made systematic repetition their signature. Choi belongs to this family, but with a notable difference: where Opałka and Kawara evacuated all emotion from their process, Choi claims on the contrary to charge each line with personal affect.
This claim to autobiography is perhaps what is most suspect in his work. How can we believe that after tracing millions of lines, each one still has a particular meaning ? Does the exercise not become purely mechanical, a routine emptied of meaning ? This is the whole ambiguity of these repetitive practices: they constantly oscillate between meditation and automatism, between total presence and mental absence.
The latest developments in his work suggest, moreover, that Choi himself is beginning to tire of his jars. His attempts at abstraction, his zooms on fragments of surface, his experiments with black and white, all this smacks of a headlong rush. The artist seeks to renew a formula that is beginning to run out of steam. Normal: twenty years painting the same motif, it wears out. Even Zen monks end up changing kōans.
Yet, paradoxically, it is perhaps now that his work becomes truly interesting. By gradually abandoning the figuration of the jar, by keeping only the networks of lines, Choi reveals what was there from the beginning: an obsessive cartography of his own psyche. These entanglements of traits no longer represent anything other than themselves, pure graphic signs freed from any representative function.
So, Choi Young Wook, genius or impostor ? Like all artists who matter, he is both sincere in his approach and calculating in his career, profound in his intentions and superficial in his effects, innovative in his radicalism and conservative in his attachment to tradition. It is this unresolved tension that makes his work so interesting.
What does Choi tell us about our time ? That we are tired of grand gestures and thunderous manifestos. That we prefer whispers to shouts. That we seek meaning in repetition rather than in rupture. That we want to believe that it is still possible to make new out of old. Illusion perhaps, but necessary illusion.
His lunar jars will continue to sell like hotcakes at international fairs. Critics will continue to expound on the Zen depth of his cracks. Collectors will continue to project their fantasies of mystical Orient onto them. And Choi will continue to trace his lines, imperturbable, locked in his bubble of certainties, mass-producing these standardized objects of contemplation that are the luxury of our time.
This is perhaps the true karma of contemporary art: being condemned to eternally repeat the same gestures while pretending that they still have meaning. Choi Young Wook understood this better than anyone. And that is why, despite all my reservations, I cannot help but find his work strangely touching. It is the mirror of our own vacuity, and that is already a lot.
- On the Dansaekhwa movement, see Yoon Jin Sup, Dansaekhwa: Korean Monochrome Painting, Seoul: Kukje Gallery, 2012.
- On Bridget Riley and Op Art, see Frances Follin, Embodied Visions: Bridget Riley, Op Art and the Sixties, London: Thames & Hudson, 2004.
- On the practice of Agnes Martin, see Arne Glimcher, Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances, London: Phaidon Press, 2012.
- On the work of Roman Opałka, see Lorand Hegyi, Roman Opałka, Paris: Éditions Dis Voir, 1996.
