O-1 Visas
Most of us are woefully ignorant of who exactly builds all the stuff we depend on in our daily lives. Before the Last Spike, a solo exhibition by jinseok choi recently on view at ArtCenter of Design in Pasadena, CA, sees this invisible labor with great empathy. Born in Seoul and currently living in Los Angeles, choi focuses on three areas of employ: the historical toil of Chinese immigrants on the transcontinental railway, the contemporary efforts of garment sweatshop workers, and his own job as an art fabricator. The remains of all this exertion—rusty spikes, fabric offcuts, wood scraps, sawdust—provide the raw material that choi transforms into tributes that range from playful to angry to elegiac. “We Return,” a series of exquisitely carved wooden masks, are based on traditional Korean folk plays, wherein the lower classes could engage in social critique of the aristocracy. “Town Square,” an elegantly ramshackle arrangement of dozens of bits of wood, was dictated by the size and shape of the remnants, rather than the other way around. The obvious labor and skill on display here, alongside solid conceptual and materialist conceits, goes a long way toward sincere recognition of workers then and now.
—Lori Waxman 2025-03-07 6:26 PM