Up Close with Choi Jeong Hwa

About Choi Jeong Hwa
Born 1961 in Seoul, Korea
Lives and works in Seoul

Choi Jeong Hwa is a Seoul-based artist and designer. He works across many disciplines – art, graphic design, industrial design and architecture – using a broad range of media including video, moulded plastic, shopping trolleys, real and fake food, lights, wires and kitsch Korean artefacts. Choi has recently worked in oversized floral-form inflatables, including lotus blossoms. This celebration of a seemingly superficial object honours the beauty of nature, and the need for imagination when living in urban cultures with a diminishing natural aesthetic. His playful practice comments on the privileged environment of art institutions and questions the prized status of artworks amidst a consumer-frenzied world. For the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Choi created a site-specific architectural intervention, Hubble Bubble (2010), outside the Sydney Opera House, and The unbearable lightness of being (2010) in the Royal Botanic Gardens. Hubble Bubble was later installed on Cockatoo Island due to weather conditions.