Goseong Choi: Anchorless Land

Goseong Choi: Anchorless Land by Aline SmithsonJuly 1, 2017

©Goseong Choi

Goseong Choi is a photographic storyteller who uses metaphors of place, mood, person to examine his life. His photographs are filled with quiet emotions, inner seeing, and the fragility of life. His newest work is Anchorless Land, a meditative reflection of death, family, and rebirth, using the thick brambled lands of Meji, in Korea, as the backdrop for his visual articulation. Goseong also had an artist’s book that accompanies this project, as seen below.

Goseong Choi (b.1984, S.Korea) currently works and resides in Brooklyn, New York. Choi’s work has been exhibited at several museums including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the New Mexico Museum of Art. His work is held in collections at Philadelphia Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, and Haggarty Museum of Art. Among others, his work has been published in, PDN, Der Greif Magazine, Photo Art, and Exposure. Online features include Lenscratch, New Direction at Detroit Center For Contemporary Photography, Conscientious, L’Oeil de la Photographie, Ain’t Bad Magazine, Phases Magazine, Prism Photo Magazine and more. He holds an M.F.A in Photography from Pratt Institute.

Anchorless Land

This work is about the things I saw while my aunt was in the coma and after the funeral.

At the scorched field in Meji village, the ash seeped into the soil with each rain and the winter gusts snatched at the reeds. There was a bone. The death of the animal was white. Crows were crying. Perhaps they witnessed it and came for the body. My aunt passed away. Father informed me about her condition a day before her death. The tragedy was standing on. She had been in coma. Her body was here but her mind had drifted somewhere else. Where could it be? I thought about the void in consciousness. And I imagined the emptiness left behind. I came back to Meji after the funeral. In the wooded darkness, intertwined branches shone like an engraving. Its gesture and rhythm consoled me. The earth turned a green a bit. The southern winds would begin blowing soon.