VENETIAN RHAPSODY - THE POWER OF BLUFF, 2016-17
"Venetian Rhapsody is the result of a rigorous re-thinking that commenced when I was invited to show my work in the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017. I had been somewhat skeptical, and even bitter, about events like the Biennale, so the invitation confronted me with a powerful inner conflict. Working through it, I had the opportunity to reflect on the geo-cultural implications of the city of Venice. For several generation or longer, Venice has been a tourist city making its living from the fusion of picturesque and commerce. It is also a city that has seeded grandiose dreams for many artists-from the souvenir painters of the Grand Tour to the romantic reverence of Turner and Ruskin, and the carnival of high-end postmodernity assembled in the Pinault Collection at the Palazzo Grassi. It seemed to me that artists and the authorities in the arts who take part in the Venice Biennale are swayed by its "power" and boast of their achievements. Perhaps, I am not an exception. I began to search for other cities that share with Venice the power to make people dream and are likewise dominated by cultural and political commercialism. Two came to my mind: Las Vegas in the West and Macao in the East. I appropriated and re-presented symbolic images of the two cities in this installation in an attempt to reflect on this conjunction. At the same time, the rooftop location of Venetian Rhapsody is also a bid to overcome the spatial imitations presented by the Korean Pavilion's unique architecture." Cody Choi
