Sandra Gering Gallery is pleased to present Ultra Immortality, Korean artist Sang-ah Choi's second solo exhibition at the gallery, from 18 September through 23 October 2004. The exhibition will include paintings and three-dimensional cut-paper works.

In both imagery and technique, Sang-ah Choi's exquisitely executed paintings present a vision of contemporary culture filtered through the lens of a traditional Korean background. The notion of immortality, symbolized in traditional Korean painting by ten symbols from nature, is at the core of Choi's content. Yet the symbols that Choi chooses to represent immortality in our culture are images of insatiable consumerism.

Among the works in the exhibition will be a series of Vogue paintings, in which Choi distills an issue of the magazine (one issue per painting) down to the imagery from every single advertisement. In Vogue Mall, the images of models, watches, shoes, etc. are laid out in a pattern that echoes a map of a shopping mall. The technique Choi uses in these works, a combination of black ink and holographic stickers covered with glossy resin, mimics the look of traditional Asian lacquer work. However, Choi's method of using relatively cheap materials consciously contrasts with the lacquer work tradition, in which only expensive materials such as mother-of-pearl are laboriously and finely crafted. Choi's choice of material underlines the ideal of disposability within the consumer culture.

The exhibition will also include Choi's delicate cut-paper drawings. In addition to individual paper pieces, there will be five folios from Choi's second "pop-up" book, the first of which was shown in her previous exhibition. In the drawings, Choi often depicts the ten traditional Korean immortality symbols, such as mushrooms and deer; yet, in Choi's work the symbols are rendered unnatural by the "Disneyfication" of their forms.

Sang-ah Choi's work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Whitney Museum, NY, and the New York Public Library, among other public and private collections. Her work is currently included in Fiction.Love, an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei.