Happening upon JooYoung Choi’s universe on a gray, drizzling day was a welcome entrance to a world where joy, transformation, self-knowledge and pie are all very important. In Choi’s new installation at the Mead Art Museum, we learn that an all-powerful entity, the Quantum Soup Surfer, is continually in the process of rehabilitating the universe, one instance of love at a time. Choi creates a cast of characters, both recognizably human and cartoonishly surreal, who protect and inhabit a virtual landscape called the Cosmic Womb, the Nexus of Love. Her multi-modal exhibit presents soft sculpture, collage, painting, drawing, animation and music.
As befits any epic journey, Choi’s resplendent installation includes a workstation — a “Buddy Station” — where visitors can choose a stuffie companion with whom to tour the exhibit. Born in 1982 in Seoul, South Korea, Choi was adopted as an infant into a New England family and now lives in Texas. She employs her original name, JeeYung, as a split-off protagonist who finally becomes reunited with her present self through the interventions of many humorous, serious and psychologically powerful imaginary characters. The artist’s intergalactic and complex narrative is outlined in a booklet available at the Buddy Station, which is fortunate, since Choi’s dynamic inner-and-outer space spectacle needs interpretation, and the colorful English-Korean book is entertaining all by itself.
Choi’s full-length animation “Spectra Force Vive” is a mashup of dancing, pies, puppets, silliness and yes — I’ll use the “e” word — empowerment. Choi cites both Fred Rogers and Tupac Shakur as influences; songs (composed by the artist herself, who studied at both Berklee College of Music and Massachusetts College of Art) abound. In an MTV-esque square format, puppets dance with costumed humans to evolve an interpolated existence of imaginary and pointedly realistic worlds — a kind of cosmic “Sesame Street” which can only exist in the alternative universe of a screen.