[THEME MUSIC]
Today we're in Houston, Texas.
And I'm delighted that we're going
to be meeting up with JooYoung Choi, who started out
as a painter, but has branched into a wide range of media
to tell the tales of her expansive, fictional land
called the Cosmic Womb.
For this imaginary world, she builds sets, sews costumes,
and makes by hand its inhabitants,
who each have their own intricate creation story
and narratives that interconnect to form the Cosmic Womb
mythology.
Choi appears in the work as well as a variety of characters,
including Queen Kiok and C.S. Watson, and earthling
from Concord, New Hampshire.
Choi herself was born in South Korea
and was adopted by a family in Concord, New Hampshire where
she grew up.
In 2008, she reunited with her birth family in South Korea.
And this experience has heavily informed and shaped the Cosmic
Womb, whose motto is, "Have faith,
for you have always been loved."
Choi's practice is radically imaginative
and explores loss, longing, and despair, as well as hope, love,
and healing.
And while she creates an entire fictional world,
she's going to ask you to will into being just one
special character.
Hi, I'm JooYoung Choi, and this is your art assignment.
I think the idea of imaginary friends,
it's something that over time maybe we give up.
And our imagination should be our friend.
I think as we get older, maybe imagination
becomes something that we're supposed to put away.
I think the idea of our own imaginary friends
are just as essential and important as adults
as they were when we were younger.
It is this idea that there is something
I'm trying to understand in my life,
and it's through a character.
Like the idea of being enough, that's
something that really fascinates me.
This idea that you already are enough right now.
You don't have to go do or be something else than what
you are to be truly loved by yourself and by the universe.
This latest character, Spacia Tanno,
that I've been playing with, who I've
done two large sculptures of, it was this idea
of how can I do the concept of you are enough
and the coming of age story together in a whole arc.
And so that has led to a number of new characters being created
and a bunch of new pieces being created.
Your assignment is to make an imaginary friend.
Now I've made a puppet, but you can make anything
that you want.
And I know that our imaginary friends, well, you
could be a little bit shy about introducing it to other people.
But I hope that you'll bring it out into the world
and share it with others.
What I love about this particular assignment
is that it's not just about creating a thing,
but it's about creating a thing and building a whole world
around it, giving it a name, a back story, a life, friends,
a context.
Yeah, I love world building.
As you know, Sarah, it's not something
that I necessarily excel at in my own writing,
but I love it as both a reader and a writer.
Whether it's the Bronte sisters coming up
with these fantastically complicated worlds
when they were little kids or J.K. Rowling's
world of Hogwarts, I just love living inside a world that
is not my own.
And when we think about this in the realm of art,
the fantastic world builders who come to mind for me are artists
such as Henry Darger, who spent decades making a three volume
illustrated manuscript titled "The Story of the Vivian Girls,
in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal
of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Child Slave
Rebellion."
It's the story of seven little girls who set out
to rescue children who had been enslaved
by adult Glandelinians.
Darger started this work when he was only 19,
and his work actually wasn't discovered
until after his death.
But even in his absence, we've been
able to follow and get to know his bizarre and utterly
compelling world.
But we're actually going to talk in today's animation
about another artist's work who was
very much an active, physical presence in bringing
his invented world to life.
SARAH URIST GREEN: You probably know
Alexander Calder for his abstract hanging sculptures
dubbed mobiles by his friend Marcel Duchamp.
He called them this because they're well, mobile,
with suspended forms that move about with the normal flow
of air.
But before he made these, Calder explored movement in objects
through his spectacular circus, a menagerie
of small sculptures designed to be performed,
not just observed.
He would gather friends, play his Victrola,
and bring the circus to life.
He fashioned acrobats, clowns, contortionists, and animals
from materials like wire, bottle caps, corks, and fabric
lying about his studio.
For as long as two hours, Calder presented act
after act, entertaining guests with elaborate routines
performed by his kinetic creations.
It was playful to be sure, but also something he
took seriously, immersing himself
and his audience in this miniature realm of danger
and delight.
JooYoung's assignment asks us to take
a similar imaginative leap, taking bits of this and that
and giving them a name, a back story,
and bringing them into contact with the world.
There's this character named Larry
that I was obsessed with two years ago,
and all I wanted to do was talk to people about Larry.
And Larry wasn't like in a real painting,
he was just this cut out I had.
And I would be like, this is Larry.
And I'd hold him up.
And Larry likes to eat bad feelings and push stuff.
Like that was his thing.
He had a wagon-- oh no, pull things.
He had a wagon.
He pulled stuff and he liked--
I don't know, he liked to eat bad feelings.
And I thought oh, well, he should have a sister.
You know like, someone to hang out with.
And that's where Bernadette came in.
I had noticed as of lately a lot of my friends
were going through this kind of feeling of defeat and maybe
some despair, this idea of kind of hopelessness.
And I thoughht, well all this hopelessness must be
useful for somebody, you know.
It's like they say sometimes that you can't have the lotus
unless you have the mud.
And I thought oh, I'll make this really wonderful character.
She'll be so lovingly wonderful and she always
wants to come be with you when you're having a hard time
and eat up all of your despair.
She was really fun to create, because I
wanted to make one you could also do stuff with her feet.
So there's elastic bands inside of her
so you could actually like make her dance.
And it what was interesting, because I
had this idea for her, but then it wasn't until I
made her that I realized she's like this fabulous dancer.
And she can do kind of like these moves
where it may be that she--
you know, like the break dancing when they do a stall.
So like she'd be-- let's see here--
I gotta get my hands in the parts.
OK.
So if she's dancing, she could always like drop
like that, you know, and like freeze
and have like a cool pose.
And then, let's see here-- go back to the--
and she can walk, which I hadn't really
ever done a walking character before that could do that.
So that was really fun.
And also to have a mouth, and there's a stick
that you can attach to her nose like so then she
could make her elephant nose go up and down.
But it was when I was playing with her
I realized that she reads through her nose,
so she can like soak up information.
So there is this level of play that
helps you understand the character,
that I think sometimes we think play is a nice idea as artists,
but it's not essential.
And more and more as I continue to make work I realize no, it's
actually what enriches and yeah, it
is very essential to the process.
Because there's so many things about her
I wouldn't have understood unless I made her.
There's two or three different ideas.
One way is to go back to your younger self
and think about three animals that you
found to be really precious to you that you really,
really loved.
They could be specific animals, like I don't know,
maybe you'd like Flipper or something.
But maybe it's just that you love the idea of a rabbit,
you know.
And so take those three animals and then blend them together
into one creature, thinking about the aspects
of that animal that you really loved and took comfort in.
Maybe you liked eagles because they could fly away and soar.
Or you liked giraffes because they had such great perspective
on what was going on because they have these long necks.
So really accentuating the features of those animals
that you like.
And then you have this amazing imaginary friend
that embodies these things that you like.
You can also do it based on the medium.
Say you haven't done a lot of photography,
or you haven't done a lot of photography and collage.
Then you could spend the day taking photographs,
print them out, and then collage them together into a creature.
So that's the medium way.
And the other one is, is by idea.
So say in your life maybe there's something
that you're trying to deal with.
Maybe like my creature, it was the idea of I
wanted to create a creature that could bring comfort and eat
feelings of defeat and despair.
And so I wanted to make this really interesting looking
character that would make you just
feel better by being around it.
But then not only that, it would eat your bad feelings.
So if it's not for you, maybe there's someone in your life
that really needs an imaginary friend that
could come cheer them up.
Or maybe loves to go outside, this friend of yours
isn't spending much time outdoors.
So maybe it's a creature that has a bad habit of just running
out outside all the time.
You know, so maybe it has beautiful legs
that run really fast, you know.
So I think those are three great ways to start your character.
So this is Milford.
Yeah, Milford is pretty shy.
He works a desk job and does a lot of numbers.
But his dream is to really make it as the guy
at karaoke that just sings and wows everybody.
Isn't that right?
Yeah.
Yeah, he likes coffee shops and bagels and I don't know,
secretly liking poetry and not letting anyone know.
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