Chan Sook Choi’s artistic practice investigates the multiple complex relationships between land and body through vectors of movement, migration, and community. Her works combine performance, installation, video, and photography in poetic and often abstract evocations of spatiality that yield a sense of place in which affect and environment are intertwined. Through the images and sounds of these affective, epistemological, and geographical topographies, Choi recalls the bodies of those who are intentionally or unintentionally marginalized, and those pushed or “leaked out” from systems, communities, and territories alike, as well as the material and immaterial traces they leave behind. Choi’s new work THE TUMBLE, commissioned by SMB12, is an outgrowth of herrecent interest in deserts and the social and natural ecologies that they breed. The artist visited Arizona for the production of the commissioned work. After a long time trying to capture the lively figures of tumbleweed–scattering seeds by riding on the wind, she could not find the tumbling tumbleweed. She instead collected a database and various information about the area where the tumbleweed appears. Based on her research, the artist conducted interviews with scientists in various fields, and learned about the biological singularity of a species that is formed by the wind, and travels away from where it grew up. Through the bodies of other species, she explores the gestures of the deformed body and the layers that constitute it.
