karma

A concept related to the cycle of cause and effect, a belief in the transmigration of the soul and a recognition that past lives, this life and the lives to come all evolve from karmic causes and from fate, which no person may elude. In his artworks, the road of life with its countless, confusing side paths has became a journey of destiny in which the self is inseparable from others. Perhaps fate has no pessimistic implications. Understood from a different angle, if we were to transform the concept of “karma” into the experience of the contemporary predicament of “globalization,” perhaps it would no longer be so mysterious and impenetrable. Ultimately, the many ecological crises imperiling our survival which we face in the age of globalization are the accretion of humanity’s collective past, and the fate we all must shoulder together. They are our karmic legacy, and our karmic connection. Put more precisely, within this “universal” of the white porcelain moon jar, Choi Young Wook slowly, patiently depicts one image after another with the unique individual life philosophy and vision of an artist, and while the traces of each image seem discernible, in fact it is impossible to map the trajectory of its life in advance. Among the interweaving crackled seams, the viewer clearly sees a network of lines that form a plane, as if the atlas of a person’s fate, or a portrait of the complexities of an interpersonal relationship, or a microcosm of the human condition in the age of globalization. Here, metaphorically transformed by the artist, the white moon jars become vessels of life. The predestination and open-endedness of life, the possibilities and impossibilities, enter the viewer’s eyes, half-hidden yet manifest, as a patterned form like an abstract code, testing our ability to glimpse invisible spirit and wisdom.