Visual artist and cultural theorist. 1980s, he attended Korea University Sociology major, Korea and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, Fine Art major, California, USA. 1994-2004, he work in New York. Currently he works in Seoul Korea. 1994-2004, he taught at New York University, New York, USA. The Year of 2004, he returned to Korea and taught at Hongik University, Seoul, Korea. His has many solo and group exhibitions in Europe, USA and Asia. He had the retrospective Exhibitions " Cody Choi: Culture Cuts (Duselldorf Kunsthalle)" traveling in Museums in Germany, France Spain from 2015 - 2017 and 2017 Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion. He is the author and co-author of “Cody Choi Fairwell to the 20th Century, Deitch Projects, New York, 1998", "Cultural Shift Hatter: Cody Choi 1986-2003, Paradise Media Press, Korea, 2003", "Topography of 20th Century Culture for Understanding Contemporary Culture. Ahn Graphics, Korea, 2006", "Topography of Contemporary Culture. Culturegrapher, Korea, 2006", "Topography of 20th Century Culture. Culturegrapher, Korea, 2010", "Cody Choi: Culture Cuts, König books, Germany, 2015". 


Cultural Indigestion(1986- ) 

After his move to the United States, the specialized art education Choi received for the first time in his new cultural environment, enabled him to think about and understand fine art by asking the fundamental question “What is beauty?” Meeting Mike Kelley, a renowned conceptual artist of the US and professor at the Pasadena Art Center College, where Cody Choi studied, critically influenced the forming of his artistic thought. Kelley’s teachings—that between the perceptions of “educated beauty” and “educational beauty,” true art places value on the formation of the “attitude” of understanding the subject, rather than on superficial beauty visible to the eye—later became the axis of Cody Choi’s world of art. 

Works on the spiritual confusion and shock the artist suffered due to the great difference between the “fantastic” American culture he obtained in Korea-based post-colonial perspectives and the “real” American culture he experienced in reality after actually moving to the United States; works from the period when the artist borrowed the expression method of body art, popular throughout the 80s and 90s in the US, in an attempt to examine his identity and Cultural Indigestion. The process by which the artist goes through a difficult period of fantasy and misunderstanding of Western culture, and severe conflict about his identity from the viewpoint of the end of the century. 

The Master of the Digital Sublime, Database Painting(1999- ) 

Cody Choi is a pioneer of digital paintings a genre that he initiated in 1997. He foresaw the coexistence of virtual reality and the real world in the 21st century then. He unveiled a digital database painting titled Twin Funeral (2002) at the 2nd Seoul International Media Art Biennale in 2002, proclaiming that the “double brain” symbolized the coexistence of virtual reality and reality that would become a typical structure in the society of the future. At that time, the painting, Twin Funeral was shown in the form of a printed image on a mesh canvas, not as the digital file itself.
Since then, digital artworks have been minted through a recent transaction in NFT art platforms as PDF files, not as physical art pieces. 
Digital painting offered a clear opportunity in the history of human civilization to prove that the coexistence of the virtual world and the real world has finally achieved a durable structure for survival, as the works as files in the cyber world are traded for astronomical amounts of cryptocurrency and the value of that cryptocurrency can also be interchanged with real money.

It was at this point that Cody Choi's approach to digital painting clearly distinguished itself from the majority of digital artists who were suddenly drawn to the recent NFT transactions. Cody Choi's digital artworks are created with thousands of layers of accumulated data, the multiplying Layers method, in CYBERSPACE itself. This contrasts with the work of other digital artists’ works which are simply the result of imagination and expression techniques taken from pixelate or digital illustrations, games, fairy tales, and cartoons. In other words, Cody Choi's database painting is the creature that inhabits a digital ecosystem and has its genesis there.

We confront a new world today in which reality and virtual reality values can coexist, something that Cody Choi envisioned, and prepared for, from the late 1990s. He was already working both on physical artworks in the real world and database paintings in cyberspace where data is formed and multiplied at that time and now is the foremost artist to pioneer the building of the most robust topographic map. He started planning for the future by producing prophetic works from the late '90s that have become the most appropriate artworks for NFT transactions today.
Cody Choi’ completed his first database painting file in 1999. His Database Paintings can be largely divided into the Animal Totem series, Multiplying Difference series, and Andrea Angelidaki series. The beginning of his Animal Totem series can be traced back to 1997 when Choi appropriated drawings of his son, who was then a kindergartener. Choi employed the computer software “Crayola Magic 3D” on 386PC computer to rework the art. Choi then expanded the animal drawings to hundreds of data files using “Cheetah,” and utilized iMac G3 and “Photoshop” for data multi-layering to realize the series in 1999. 

In 1997, in preparation for his Multiplying Difference series, Choi downloaded data concerning colors and scratch patterns on the internet from AOL. Using “Cheetah” and “Photoshop” to multiply layers 500 to 1000 times, he finalized an abstract painting in 1999. For the Andrea Angelidaki series, Cody received data on cyber architecture from an architect Andrea whom he met, through Miltos Manetas during his stay in New York. Using 3D modeling software, “Cheetah,” “Photoshop,” and “Crayola Magic 3D,” he finished this series in 2001.
Cody Choi’s Database Painting demonstrates that creation in digital art can be traced back to data itself and that the multiplication of data can be a means of sublimating computer evolution into a genuine work of art. This year Art Basel Hong Kong (May 23rd to 25th), Cody Choi's early database painting Animal Totem series (1999) will be presented.
The database painting series was featured at many exhibitions such as the New York University Faculty Exhibition , New Pictorialism Database Painting, We are in Jungle (Kukje Gallery, Seoul and PKM Gallery , Continental Shift-Aachen/Heerlen  in 2000. 
Over the next 20 years, he exhibited his Database Paintings in retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf ; Musée d'art Contemporain de Marseille .); Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz  and at many group exhibitions, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei , Exhibition Halls in the Rectorate of the University of Málaga , 6th Busan Biennale , 6th Shanghai Biennale , Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles , CAIS Gallery , Seoul Museum of Art , Arario Gallery .
As a pioneer in the field of digital art, Cody Choi has achieved fame for his innovative and compelling Database Paintings. In the early 2000, world-renowned art critics such as John Welchman, Laurence A. Rickle, and Gregor Jensen wrote about Choi’s Database Painting, and related art professionals such as Robert Rosenblum (former Senior Curator at Guggenheim), Peter Halley, and Mike Kelley to include Choi’s Database Painting in their personal collections.

Su Wei - Hard Mix Master- Cody Choi’s Art Practice, 2020

Bartomeu Mari - Hybrid Nobles. On The Recent Work of Cody Choi, 2020

John C. Welchman - Cultural Indigestion: The Work of Cody Hyun Choi, 2017

Laurence A. Rickels - Rebirth as Author, 2017

Gregor Jansen - Behind the Mirrors: Aspects of Reflection in the Work of Cody Hyun Choi, 2015

Marie de Brugerolle - Cody Hyun Choi: Canons/Cannons, 2015

Mike Kelley - Dyspecptic Universe: Cody Hyun Choi's Peto-Bismol Paintings, 1992

All courtesy of PKM Gallery.