bitforms gallery

U-Ram Choe
New Active Sculptures
November 30, 2006 – January 20, 2007

bitforms gallery is pleased to announce a the New York debut of Korean artist U-Ram Choe (b.1970, Seoul). This exhibit marks the artist’s first solo show in the United States.

U-Ram Choe’s work engages a fanciful dialog of aesthetics and machinery, and explores themes of biological transformation, flight, and movement. In his recent work, large-scale metal and plastic automata materialize with such a delicacy and weightlessness that it seems to take on the shape and silhouette of an organic life form. Motors, heat and light sensitive materials add to the intricacy of Choe’s kinetic sculptures.

With Choe’s incorporation of scientific nomenclature into artwork titling systems, walking into the gallery space can be reminiscent of touring a prehistoric exhibit at a natural science or history museum—there are certain elements of recognition: mechanical diagrams, text descriptions of habitats, visible evidence of fins evolving into wings, and even propellers. The warm biologic livelihoods of machine-creatures become the subject in Choe’s work. These dynamic forms bear emotion and have anthropological roots, despite their streamlined metallic sheen. Narratives authored by the artist complement his 3-dimensional designs and drawings:

Echo Navigo (Adult)
Scientific Name : Anmorome Istiophorus platypterus Uram

The Echo Navigo lives near huge antenna in the city, and eats all sorts of electric waves. Therefore, these electronic-beings have fins that enable them to fly through the flow of electric waves. During the daytime they can make their body transparent, so that it is not easy to see them.

These creatures were first found by a telephone engineer, who was trying to find the reason for the echo caused by the creature’s fast flight around radio antennae. The larvae of Echo Navigo were found nearby.

In addition to Echo Navigo (Adult), 2004, this exhibition includes a new four-part installation in the center of the gallery space.

Late Spring 2007 work by U-Ram Choe will be featured in a solo exhibition at The Crow Collection ofAsian Art in Dallas. Past solo exhibitions of his work have included Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan, Do Art Gallery, and Hello Art gallery both in Seoul. Choe’s work also been exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale, Seoul Museum of Art, Samsung Museum, Sungkok Art Museum, Busan’s Metropolitan Art Museum, Art Basel Switzerland, the New York Armory Show, Gallery Hyundai, Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, bitforms Seoul, Art Space Hue in Seoul, Gallery ChiWoo in Goachon, the Beijing Expocenter, Seoul Olympic Art Museum, and Seoul Forest Open Air Sculpture Symposium.