Glimpses of the Cosmic Womb Universe
I think the first time I saw artwork by JooYoung Choi was in 2013 at the annual Big Show at Lawndale. Her piece in that exhibit was a large painting called Sacrifice of Putt-Putt. Looking back on it, one can see that Choi was using characters in a fictional scenario, and in her subsequent work, the use of characters and a fictional narrative becomes more prominent. What Choi (and other artists like her) do is create a fictional world or universe, inhabit it with characters who all have different physical appearances, personalities, and capabilities. I analogize it with such fictional universes as The Lord of the Rings or Pokemon or the Marvel Universe. One could call these universes they’ve created mythoi, except a myth is orally transmitted, authorless, and used by the culture that created it to explain how a that culture came to be. What Choi does is different, but if we consider the history of art from the earliest civilization until the beginning of the last century or so, the illustration of mythological characters has been a recurring interest of artists. For the first few thousand years of human history, these characters were assumed by their artists to be real personas. After 391 AD, when Theodosius 1 outlawed paganism in the Roman empire, artistic depictions of Greek and Roman gods became an exercise in fiction. But even if the gods were no longer worshipped, artists loved to depict them and art lovers liked seeing them. So even if what Choi produces is not a mythos in the classical sense, it resembles one. And it allows Choi to depict her characters doing different things at different times.
Choi calls her fictional world the Cosmic Womb. She writes about it on her website:
The Cosmic Womb is a small planet that stretches over approximately 6,732 miles, it is governed by Queen Kiok and council of humanoid creatures called Tuplets, Lady K, Aidee Three, Emo Flowers (No. 36), Kun-Yook Six, Lydia “Nine” Fletcher, Haneul-Sek aka Nina Blue and one Earthling from Concord, NH named C.S. Watson).
The Cosmic Womb is a member of the Veritas Circle an organization present throughout the larger Wonderverse a collection of realities and universes that exist within Choi’s ever growing mythos.
Queen Kiok is aided not only by the Tuplets but also a diverse community of super heroes and organizations including: Spacia Tanno, Plan-Genda, Pleasure Vision, Pound Cake Man, Spectra Force Vive - Infinite Pie Delivery Service, and The Liberated Black Heavenly Bodies Alliance.
OK, it’s easy to get lost in this, but that is one of the satisfying things about a fictional universe. Fans can get lost in the seemingly infinite details. They are like the narrative equivalent of fractal geometries—the more you drill down, the more details there are.
JooYoung Choi has a large exhibit on display at Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art called The Table of Love. The exhibition space is huge and the artwork sprawls across it.
As a consequence of her universe-building, she paints the same characters in different images. For instance, Pound Cake Man in at least three paintings in the exhibit.
I don’t know what to make of Pound Cake Man based solely on his appearance in these paintings. Who is he? Does he have a particular place in the Cosmic Womb mythos? Does he have his own story? It makes me think of being a kid and seeing an images of Thor or Captain America and being sucked in. I want to read or watch the adventures of Pound Cake Man.
The same can be said of many of the characters that appear in artworks in this exhibition. A painting shows us a glimpse of them, but their existence is a story not yet told. I suspect those stories already exist in some detail in Choi’s mind: we just get flashes of them.
I’m going to jump into a historical analogy here. This is Titian’s painting Bacchus and Ariadne (1522-23).
We know the story of Ariadne (abandoned on an island by Theseus) and Bacchus (the hard partying God of wine, accompanied by his posse) and that Bacchus is smitten by her and subsequently turns her into a constellation. Titian was painting a story that every educated contemporary of his already knew. And even if they didn’t know it, the backstory could be easily discovered. Not so with Choi’s mythos. We can’t Google her brain to find out the stories of Spacia Tanno, Pound Cake Man, or Tourmaline.
Beyond these mythological paintings of characters, Choi also creates magical devices. These are high-tech but playful and colorful devices to help the users in their life.
These remind me of the high tech objects created by Jack Kirby, creator of most of the Marvel Comics universe. He gave the Fantastic Four and Thor extremely technological but colorful devices and homes to live it. Choi’s devices make me imagine Fisher-Price producing high tech but magical machinery.
And to make the analogy to Marvel comics even stronger, she produces covers for non-existent comic books starring her characters, such as Songs of Resilience from the Tapestry of Faith. Like a comic book, it has a logo, a publisher name (Veritas Press), and little blurbs hyping the contents of this imaginary comic book.
In addition to this, she also designed trading cards for her characters. These are part of the “CWU Series 1”, which feels highly technical, but in the world of comics and trading cards, it’s how different trading card sets are referred to. I assume that CWU stands for “Cosmic Womb Universe.” Why trading cards? I think among creators of fictional universes, they are one of the tools used to help fans keep track of the myriad characters inhabiting the universe. (The fault in Choi’s card is that we can’t turn them over to read a paragraph of so describing the character depicted.)
All the paintings with characters in them are set in dark locations with stars visible. (Or they could be in space.) Choi paints primarily in bold, flat colors (which is another call-back to old comic books), but occasionally shows of some subtle modeling, as in Venatorius Stomp and the Courage Vampires. The figure in the foreground has chiaroscuro elements, but the figures behind her and the wall she is walking in front of are constructed of flat planes of color.
These paintings appeal to me because of how Choi designs and paints her characters—bold and flat and intensely colored—but also because they call back to my junior high days of Marvel comics fandom. (We didn’t have Marvel trading cards then, but Marvel licensed their characters to the Southland Corporation, who put them on plastic Slurpee cups. I drank way too many slurpees in order to collect these plastic cups with obscure Marvel characters like Dr. Strange’s magical girlfriend, Clea, on them.) After seeing this exhibit (and other Cosmic Womb-related art by Choi over the years) I want to pick up that issue of Songs of Resilience from the Tapestry of Faith and read it.
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