A Few Notes on JooYoung Choi

This is a good month to catch up on JooYoung Choi, a Houston artist whose work has fascinated me for ten years. She has two simultaneous exhibits which delve deeply into her work: JooYoung Choi: Love and Wondervision is on view at the Moody Center for the Arts through August 26, and JooYoung Choi: Discovering Truth Will Make Me Free at the Inman Gallery through September 1.

I first saw her work at the Big Show in 2013. The works from that period feel to me to be closely tied to her own life story. Choi was born in South Korea and adopted by Americans in 1983. She later found her birth parents and reestablished contact with them.

JooYoung Choi, Welcome Home, We’ve Been Waiting For You, 2015, acrylic paint and paper on canvas

Without knowing what was in Choi’s mind, it feels like she has painted a bunch of self-portraits as a very young girl, all sleeping snugly in a large bed. Is this a vision of showing up in Concord, New Hampshire, where she was adopted? I have no idea, but it doesn’t seem directly related to her vast fictional universe that becomes the subject of most of her subsequent work. However, she does connect this Concord girl to her subsequent project, the Wonderverse.

JooYoung Choi, C.S. Watson: My Name Is a Strange Paradise, 2015, acrylic on canvas

C.S. Watson is a character in Choi's Wonderverse. She is apparently a co-ruler of the planet Cosmic Womb. I don’t know when Choi conceived of the Cosmic Womb. Did it come before or after she painted this portrait of Watson? The reason I am curious is because I want to know if the Cosmic Womb grew out of character Watson, or vice versa. Also, is Watson a stand-in for Choi herself?