Cody Choi became known in the 1990s when he was working in New York City and attracted considerable attention with the exhibition The Thinker staged at Deitch Projects, NY. Inspired by Rodin’s Le Penseur, the exhibition featured seated figures, formed out of pink Pepto-Bismol® and lavatory paper, sitting on toilets and reflecting on the meaning of the world; the figures were placed on top of empty transport crates in which the artist’s posterior had taken a seat, digesting and excreting the cultural input. Choi had been born in South Korea in 1961. Following the death of his father, the family had emigrated to California in 1982. Under the military dictatorship in Korea his father’s company was nationalized and the early deaths of both his sisters traumatized his mother and himself. In Los Angeles in addition, he found himself exposed to racial discrimination.

In 1985, Choi took up the study of art in Los Angeles alongside John Baldessari and under his mentor Mike Kelley, who aroused his interest in post-colonial theories and cultural differences. The two men have a shared concern for the theme of collective fears and desires, which can mostly be traced back to religious, social or sexual conditioning. In Choi, the deeply disturbing experiences of separation and uprooting led to a psychological crisis. He created his first body-related sculptures and conceptual works, his focus being on the search for identity in a foreign culture. Kelley wrote a first brief text about Choi, who in the mid-1990s relocated to New York. In multiple references to Michelangelo, Auguste Rodin, Marcel Duchamp or Gerhard Richter, Choi began to take over western works of art and their ready-formulated attitudes, re-defining them in the sense of Appropriation Art. His works negotiated both philosophical and aesthetic themes and clichés, showing a repeated concern for body-related, sculptural energy-storage and metabolism. Choi addressed the theme of the conditio humana, of being human in an alien, superficial culture by setting the existentially experienced Easternness of his origins in relation to the fantastic elements of the American dream. In 1995 the artist stated that “Despite innumerable cultural exchanges we only know one another but do not understand one another. It is as if we eat foods but do not digest them.”

Since the year 2003, Choi has again been living in his country of origin, which has undergone major change. Whilst his student years in America had been characterized by the viewpoint of an Asian immigrant, who came laden with clichés derived from the cinema and television and experienced a cultural entry shock, now he is viewed as the foreigner, the American. In 2015, the exhibition Culture Cuts in the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf gave him his first large-scale overview exhibition (which went on to further locations in Marseille, Madrid and Chemnitz). Choi’s strongly autobiographical creative work marked by appropriation reveals manifold cultural differences between East and West which he has experienced in the course of his life. In 2017, he and Lee Wan designed the Korean Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale: a stirring, angry, apocalyptic contribution on the art business, which he describes as casino-capitalism – alongside the equally sombre German gloom of Anne Imhof’s “Faust”.