GYRE GALLERY, a gallery space on the third floor of the GYRE shopping complex in Omotesando, will be hosting an exhibition by Choi Jeonghwa, one of Korea's most acclaimed contemporary artists, titled "Blooming Matrix: A Blooming Forest," from November 15 to February 24, 2020.


Choi Jeonghwa is an artist and designer whose work spans a variety of fields, including visual art, graphic design, industrial design, and architecture. Inspired by the harmony and chaos of urban environments, he installs his own works outside museums, subverting the hierarchy of museums. His playful works question the privileged environment of art institutions and the frenzied consumer world. He previously created a 10-story installation made from 1,000 discarded doors. He also adorned Seoul's Olympic Stadium with a garland made from 2 million pieces of trash, transforming the building's surface into a shimmering jewel. In other works, he explores artificiality and permanence through ideas like plastic food and flowers. He rejects categorization of his work, embracing the viewer's free imagination. His motto is "Your heart is my art."


Choi's worldview can be summed up in the phrase "Seiseikatsukatsu," or "living life." It conveys the message that our seemingly mundane lives and everyday lives are already brimming with dynamism and vitality. The act of collecting, rearranging, and re-arranging all sorts of junk from the world is like a ritual of digging up the parched soil of our world and sowing seeds. Eventually, the roots spread out into the earth, the trunks and branches reach for the sky, flowers bloom and bear fruit, and eventually a tree and a forest emerges. Choi's creations, or alchemy, express the profound laws of nature with artificial objects; in other words, flowers and forests that thrive as living things.

As the space and artworks overlap, Choi's works shine like lightning, twist like spirals, and are reborn through dynamic transformation and creation, creating finite, infinite, and countless different movements, which resonate with the meaning and location of GYRE, the venue for this exhibition. As the name "GYRE" suggests, "vortex" means "swirl" and "rotation," and the concept behind GYRE is "living while being aware of what is happening in the world." The concept embodies this philosophy, "SHOP & THINK." Choi, nicknamed "Multiple Choi Jeong-hwa" for his work encompassing almost the entire gamut of art and culture, is active in every aspect of life, constantly moving between the boundaries of art and non-art. Don't miss this solo exhibition by this iconic icon of Korean contemporary art in the 1990s and one of the most influential artists of the 2000s and beyond.