During this talk, artist Chan Sook Choi and Dr. Matthew Chew discuss the artist’s latest work, THE TUMBLE, commissioned by SMB12 and on view at SeMA Seosomun. Choi introduces the research process that led her to the Arizona desert, the United States, and invites Dr. Matthew Chew, an ecologist and historian, to Korea to talk about various topics surrounding the work, in which the artist explores the biological singularity of the tumbleweed, a species that is formed by the wind and travels away from where it originally grew up. Dr. Chew, elaborates on the concepts of native and exotic species, along with historical and scientific examples that sit outside of usual science and botany frameworks. Choi and Chew discuss and share perspectives around the metaphors used in the fields of art and science to talk about the displacement of earthly bodies, and the complications that constitute them.

Ecologist and historian Matthew Chew has lived mostly in the southwestern United States. He is currently teaching “Nature and Media” and “Novel Ecosystems” at Arizona State University, where he also assists Fine Arts graduate students with nature-related projects. He was awarded an Oxford research fellowship in 2014, and his writings about metaphors and nativeness have appeared in the major journals Science and Nature. His publications in history and conservation have been cited over 2000 times in over 300 different journals.