featured artists
playgrounds of possibility
Make the hostile hospitable with artist, Kiwan Choi.
For Kiwan Choi, the playground transcends its role as a jovial site of childhood innocence, evolving into a metaphor for the complexities and contradictions of human existence. Inspired by Derrida’s philosophy of otherness, he invites us into a space where the tension between hospitality and hostility plays out on repeat.
Kiwan’s experience as a foreigner, particularly during his relocation from Korea to Germany, marks a major shift in perception. His paintings reflect the growing sense of displacement he feels while navigating geographical spaces scarred by division and conflict. They morph into symbolic ecosystems of social relationships, where human mobility, yearnings for connection, and existential fears intersect. Through this lens, Kiwan critiques the social boundaries and implicit structures that resist integration and reject instinctive impulses to unite.
Ingrained in the natural world, Kiwan’s artistic process echoes the organic cycles of creation, dissolution, and regeneration. Deconstructing and reconstructing images based on photographs of playgrounds, his pieces oscillate between concrete and abstract forms. Like landscapes reshaped by erosion, they reflect the spirit of constant transformation, symbolizing the dismantling of rigid norms and the potential porousness of human and ecological boundaries. His portfolio emerges as an arena in flux, where personal history, cultural estrangement, and the dualities of joy and fear, safety and danger, inclusion and exclusion continue to clash and coalesce at will.
Kiwan believes in the transformative potential of human reciprocity. After the birth of his daughter, his works concretized into traces, remnants, and botanical motifs of tearing. Drawing from Mother Earth, he likens tearing to the way Monstera plants shed leaves to share sunlight, celebrating the spontaneous acts of self-sacrifice, decomposition, and renewal that sustain our collective struggle for survival.
In Kiwan’s Erased Places, nature and humanity reflect one another, and fluid expressions of play expand understandings of mutualism, resilience, and adaptation. Together, they become an integral force that quashes existential anxieties and fashions inclusive clearings where personal, cultural, and environmental synergies positively reconfigure the boundaries of belonging.
