Cuckoo, Puckuck
Eunsun Choi
Thursday, October 5, 2023 - 6:00pm to Thursday, October 26, 2023 - 6:00pm
Opening: Thursday, October 5, 6:00pm
The cuckoo bird stands as a symbol of resilience in the face of pandemic ambiguity. Throughout history, creative minds have explored themes of plague and contagion. Noteworthy examples such as Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man” draw from the authors’ personal encounters with illness, weaving detailed reflections with prophecy insights. These visionary stories, and others like them, have indelibly shaped our collective psyche. How might we craft missives for our future selves amidst the uncertainty of contemporary infectious threats?
Eunsun Choi’s cacophonous installation of cuckoo “clocks” amplifies feelings of discomfort and anxiety. The timepieces, once symbols of status in South Korean households after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, carry echoes of her upbringing—tinged with nostalgia and complexity. Ceramic birds unpredictably burst forth from their makeshift homes, each emiting a disinct Korean onomatopoeia “puckuck!” call, mirroring and magnifying today’s prevailing sense of unease.
Despite the bird’s exceptional adaptability, the Western interpretation of “cuckoo” is synonymous with eccentricity or ailment. Cuckoo, Puckuck conveys this dual narrative: the shifts in human behavior in response to global upheaval, alongside the simultaneous celebration of our resilience and determination.
Eunsun Choi is a multidisciplinary and conceptual artist born in Korea, currently living in Seattle. She is a graduate of the Hunter College MFA program and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Washington in the DXARTS program. Recent solo installations and exhibitions include the Seattle Art Fair, Out of the Box gallery in Seoul, and the Thomas Hunter Project Space in NYC. Her work has also been featured in numerous group shows in New York State, Queens, Brooklyn, and South Korea. Choi has participated in the Sculpture Space Residency in Utica and the Hunter College Ceramic Residency. She was selected for the upcoming NY+20 Artist Residency in China, 2024 and at PLAYA in Oregon, 2024. Her artist team, Jeju Island Artist Collective, was a recipient of the NYFA Queens Art Fund and City Artist Corp Grant in 2021.
About SPAM New Media Festival:
This year we launch SPAM, a Seattle based experimental arts festival which brings together practitioners working on the fringes and frontiers of new media art and knowledge production. Taking place at various venues across Seattle, the yearly festival consists of a program of exhibitions, performances and discussions rooted in, or emerging from, technology driven art and digital culture. This includes, but is not limited to, the projects of artists and researchers working within the fields of AI, robotics, sound, experimental video, VR, wearable technology, photogrammetry and radio.
For this year’s program, SPAM is thankful to be collaborating with Henry Art Gallery, Mini Mart City Park, Method Gallery, Gallery 4Culture, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Georgetown Steam Plant and Meany Hall at the University of Washington.
Please visit our website to see more about this year’s program of exhibitions, performances, and participating artists.