Choi Chung Chun
«Autoportrait aux enfers» - Installation - 2009
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 11
Installation
Until now, photography has adhered single-mindedly to the facile antithesis between the glamorous, approving portrait and the caricatural likeness designed to inspire dislike, fear, indignation, or compassion. Born Chinese but French by adoption, M. Choi today introduces into photographic art both the madcap self-portraiture of the 18th-century sculptor Messerschmidt and the metaphysics of the anamorphosis as applied in the 17th by French optical scientists working in monasteries. There is something of the wizard about M. Choi, whose talents as a technician every major photography professional in Paris knows well. How will he manage, in photography, to follow Pascal's commandment: "Once one knows oneself, one has to continue to the point of horror?" the dizzying disfigurations into which he can twist his face plunge his features into abyss of madness, into superhuman suffering or sub-animal ferocity and on an infernal journey where both the starting and the end point is the pure and restful profile of a slant-eyed Buddha.
