Jeongmoon Choi's Floating Horizon is on view at the Centre for International Light Art, as part of the group exhibition Light-Land-Scapes.
Light-Land-Scapes
Exhibition period: 5 June 2025 – 4 January 2026
Venue: Centre for International Light Art, 59423 Unna, Germany
The line is also at the focus in the spatial drawings of South Korean artist Jeongmoon Choi. She finds an appropriate material for her Drawing in Space series of works in threads, made visible through the use of UV light. The point of departure for her installations is always the given space; building on this, the artist creates a concept for her three-dimensional drawings. The absence of daylight in the below-ground exhibition area in Unna provides the ideal conditions for bringing the interplay of UV light and the reflective line structures into effect.
Here, the space, enveloped in a soft black, retreats further. The robust industrial architecture with its uneven masonry is probed and redefined by the fragile-looking and taut threads emerging, fluorescent, out of the darkness. These light-lines are our sole clues as to the room’s limits. The occasional meeting of work with space enables localization, similar to waymarking set into the landscape. The movement – the line – away from that point beats a graphic path of light. As the plane extends into the space, the line materializes as a gleaming thread and the drawing becomes tangible through our movement. Each thread tensed by Choi is a conscious decision in favour of a certain path. A change in the lines’ direction produces a plane; a superimposition of multiple planes not only new structures, but also new spaces: point becomes line, line becomes plane, plane becomes space. This space-within-space structure – the surrounding architecture that seems to fade in the mystical darkness and the planes of straight lines – generates the impression of a slight vibration in the space as a whole; for while the boundaries of the actual space appear to dissolve, the overlapped crosshatching of the spatial elements brings new structures to the fore due to a moiré effect. The feeling of disorientation that arises can also be understood as a call to action to explore the space and the landscape in its labyrinthine arrangement and seek orientation.
For the first time, the artist is using two different colours for one thread, thus generating a horizontal in the space which gives the piece its title. At the point where the colour green, coming from above, meets the colour blue, coming from below, a boundary is created and forms another plane, apparently separating top from bottom. Unlike the many threads, this floating line has no material, graspable existence and is virtual. In this case, the shaping in space is the product of colour alone. Balanced with precision, the horizon can be used as a reliable reference if one is wrestling for some orientation amid the irregular architecture and the changeable architecture of light. However, the horizontal is arranged below average eye level, and that means that we visitors are not drawn into the space solely through our movement, but we can also experience the work in motion from top to bottom. Thus, the habitual movement forwards is supplemented by a vertical movement, when we try to form a horizontal out of the colour division of the individual threads by bending or kneeling.
Text courtesy of the Centre for International Light Art.
Images: Jeongmoon Choi, Light-Land-Scape, Centre for International Light Art, 2025 (installation view).
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