Sy.mptom Lee



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Sy Choi (Soo Yeon Choi)
                                            She captures various symptoms in the post-Internet and hyper-connected era and weaves them as possible scenarios. "Sadness is Dancing" (2021) and "I'll Call You (2021)" is the beginning of her storytelling work, which were produced based on disconnection of relationships and diaspora of surrounding families. After that, there was a story of a person left behind behind, so she began to dig into the fake Nostelgia, and ghost images with ambiguous nationality and roots in the hyper-connected era media.




I Saw Your Ghost from Television (2024)

Behind Korea's rapid growth in 2000s, there is the appropriation of Western culture and optical fiber. The Western culture that Hollywood advocates has reached Korea through optical fiber as a culture as an image. I spent my childhood admiring distant countries, but I am still living in Korea. All of my favorite images are based on the fantasy of unreachable distances, unknown images on the Internet, and vintage film photos from the United States and Europe in the 20th century. Now an image that reminds me a gas station next to a highway in old American movie can born even if I take a picture of a random gas station. In other words, all of my photos and paintings are recreated under my fingertips with ambiguous illusions.

The problem, however, begins with a change that I no longer have such fantasy. Today, movies are often compared to material ghosts. Cameras that were believed to capture the truth have been transformed into tools that produce visions. At the same time, they have become wandering around in places that are both true and not true, neither the world nor the underworld. Now, only the feeling of emptiness of 'something existed and then disappeared' remains. I got something to say that I have lost it, but it’s ironic since it was never been mine in the first place. There is creepy feeling like ran into ghosts for a while and then escaped. I tried to express that kind of emptiness by capturing ghosts wandering around the lost ruins.




Silent Image Holy Image (2023)