video sound performance
Jung Hee Choi
Composition in the Style of La Monte Young's 1960 Sustained Friction Sounds (2000)
RICE (1999)
in a setting of
Imagic Light, Marian Zazeela
Environmental Composition 2017 #1 v. 2, Jung Hee Choi
Sunday, November 10, 2024, 7 pm
MELA Foundation Dream House
275 Church Street, 3rd Floor, New York
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As a special tribute, MELA Foundation presents the Dream House’s 31st Year and the La Monte Young 89th Birthday Celebration Live Performance of Jung Hee Choi’s Composition In The Style Of La Monte Young's 1960 Sustained Friction Sounds in a setting of her video sound installation, RICE, in collaboration with Marian Zazeela's environment, Imagic Light, on Sunday November 10, at 7:00 pm, in the Dream House, 275 Church Street, 3rd floor, New York, NY. Additional celebratory tribute concerts will be presented on December 12 and 13, RICHARD MAXFIELD, Perspectives for La Monte Young (1961-62) and December 20 and 21, JUNG HEE CHOI, Seven (2024) on Walter De Maria Instrument for La Monte Young (1966).
In May–June 2003, Choi presented RICE, a video sound performance and installation in the MELA Dream House, which was chosen as one of The 10 Best of 2003 in the December Artforum: “A hypnotic projection of rotating mandalic forms radiated out from Zazeela’s magenta color field like silent fireworks, while the sound of Choi tracing a circle around the top of an overturned cooking pot with a rice paddle created a single repeating tone that resonated deep in the solar plexus.”
The program features Jung Hee Choi as both a sonic and visual artist, with her video piece RICE (1999) to a live solo performance of her Composition in the Style of La Monte Young’s 1960 Sustained Friction Sounds (2000). As the latter title implies, Choi is both celebrating her discipleship and carrying a tradition forward—in her own voice, as that tradition continues to evolve. The 2003 MELA presentation marked the first collaboration between Marian Zazeela and Choi on a simultaneous light environment.
Marian Zazeela has written about the installation of RICE in her environment Imagic Light II: “During an extended viewing of RICE superposed on my Imagic Light projections in the Dream House, I perceived an ecstatic array of fundamental archetypal images that were generated by the RICE patterns: crystals; swastika; lotus; square; flower (rose), chakra; wheel; spiral; circle; rose window (cathedrals); star; snowflakes: the procession of order out of chaos and back to order that reflects the ebb and flow of all of life.”
La Monte Young wrote about Choi’s live performance of the work at the MELA Dream House on October 14, 2005, as part of the La Monte Young Seventieth-Birthday Celebration:
In her statement Choi wrote:
Jung Hee Choi is an artist/musician and has presented Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest (2007– ), a series of environmental compositions with light, evolving light-point patterns, drawing, incense, performance, and sound. Her work has been presented in the United States, Europe, and Asia including FRAC Franche-Comté, France; Berliner Festspiele, Bundeskunsthalle, Germany; Galerie l’elac, Lausanne, Switzerland; Dia Art Foundation, Guggenheim Museum and MELA Foundation Dream Houses, NYC; FRESH Festival, Bangkok; Korea Experimental Arts Festival. Commissioned by MELA Foundation, her video sound performance and installation, RICE, was chosen as one of The 10 Best of 2003 in the December Artforum. The New York Times wrote about Choi’s multimedia installation Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest IX at Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House, NYC, “With extended listening, what at first seemed mechanically repetitious turns out to be a complex interweaving of different, slowly oscillating pitches. If you give in to it while watching Ms. Choi’s hallucinatory screen, you may find yourself in an altered state of consciousness, on the verge of some ineffable, transcendental revelation.” Choi is the senior disciple of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. In 2002, she co-founded, with Young and Zazeela, The Just Alap Raga Ensemble and, in 2009, The Sundara Trio. Choi’s electroacoustic and modal improvisation ensemble, The Sundara All Star Band, premiered in 2015. The members include Young, Zazeela, Choi, Jon Catler, Hansford Rowe and Naren Budhkar. The New York Times listed Choi’s Tonecycle for Blues performed by her Sundara All Star Band as one of The Best Classical Music Performances of 2017. Choi’s work is in the collection of the FRAC Franche-Comté and Dia Art Foundation. Since 2009, Choi’s long-term multimedia installations have been presented both solo and simultaneously with Young and Zazeela’s sound and light in the MELA Dream House, creating a continuous collaborative environment.
La Monte Young pioneered the concept of extended time durations in 1957 and for over 60 years contributed extensively to the development of just intonation and rational number-based tuning systems in his performance works and the periodic composite sound waveform environments of the Dream House collaborations formulated in 1962 with Marian Zazeela. Presentations of his work in the U.S. and Europe, as well as his theoretical writings gradually had a wide-ranging influence on contemporary music, art and philosophy, including Minimalism, concept art, Fluxus, performance art and conceptual art. In L.A. in the ’50s, Young played jazz saxophone, leading a group with Billy Higgins, Dennis Budimir and Don Cherry. He also played with Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Terry Jennings, Don Friedman, and Tiger Echols. At Yoko Ono’s studio in 1960 he was director of the first New York loft concert series. He was the editor of An Anthology, which with his Compositions 1960 became a primary influence on concept art and the Fluxus movement. In 1962 Young founded his group The Theatre of Eternal Music and embarked on The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, a large work involving improvisation within strict predetermined guidelines. Young and Zazeela helped bring renowned master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath to the U.S. in 1970 and became his first Western disciples. Described by Mark Swed in his October 2009 Los Angeles Times blog as “pure vibratory magic," Young’s Just Alap Raga Ensemble, founded in 2002 with Zazeela and their senior disciple Jung Hee Choi, has become his primary performance vehicle. "For the past quarter of a century he has been the most influential composer in America. Maybe in the world." (Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 1985). "As the acknowledged father of minimalism and guru emeritus to the British art-rock school, his influence is pervasive" (Musician magazine, 1986). “Young is now widely recognized as the originator of the most influential classical music style of the final third of the twentieth century.” (Strickland, Minimalism:Origins, 1993). “La Monte Young: Le Son du Siècle.” (L’Express L’An 2000 Supplement, 1999).
Marian Zazeela is one of the first contemporary artists to use light as a medium of expression. Expanding the traditional concepts of painting and sculpture while incorporating elements of both disciplines, she developed an innovative visual language in the medium of light by combining colored light mixtures with sculptural forms to create seemingly three-dimensional colored shadows in radiant vibrational fields. Zazeela began singing in 1962 with La Monte Young as a founding member of The Theatre of Eternal Music, and performed as vocalist in almost every concert of the ensemble to date, in addition to creating the visual components of Dream House, their collaborative sound and light work. Her major work, The Magenta Lights, has been described in Art Forum as representing “the subtle relationship between precision and spirituality. [She] transforms material into pure and intense color sensations, and makes a perceptual encounter a spiritual experience." With Young in 1970, she brought Pandit Pran Nath to the U.S. and became one of his first Western disciples. She has since performed and taught the Kirana style of Indian classical music and accompanied Pandit Pran Nath in hundreds of concerts throughout the world. Zazeela’s distinctive calligraphic style appears on many of Pran Nath’s concert posters and recordings. Zazeela’s Ornamental Lightyears Tracery has been credited by Glenn Branca in Forced Exposure #16, 1990, and by David Sprague in Your Flesh #28, 1993, to have been the direct influence on Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The Village Voice listed the [Church Street] Dream House as the Best Art Installation in New York 2014, “A charge for the mind as much as for the eye and ear, the Dream House feels like a gift to our beleaguered city, where headspace is the most precious real estate of all.” Zazeela continued to perform as a vocalist until 2018 in The Just Alap Raga Ensemble and The Sundara All Star Band, which she founded with Young and Jung Hee Choi. In 2021 Zazeela was honored as one of the 14 artists to receive the prestigious Anonymous Was A Woman Award in recognition of her significant contributions. Zazeela’s rarely-seen master works on paper were featured at Dia:Beacon from 2019 to 2022, and most recently at Zazeela’s graphic work and abstract calligraphic drawings, spanning from 1962 through 2003, were on view at Artists Space in New York until May 11, 2024.
MELA's programs are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and generous contributions from individuals and MELA Members.
In May–June 2003, Choi presented RICE, a video sound performance and installation in the MELA Dream House, which was chosen as one of The 10 Best of 2003 in the December Artforum: “A hypnotic projection of rotating mandalic forms radiated out from Zazeela’s magenta color field like silent fireworks, while the sound of Choi tracing a circle around the top of an overturned cooking pot with a rice paddle created a single repeating tone that resonated deep in the solar plexus.”
The program features Jung Hee Choi as both a sonic and visual artist, with her video piece RICE (1999) to a live solo performance of her Composition in the Style of La Monte Young’s 1960 Sustained Friction Sounds (2000). As the latter title implies, Choi is both celebrating her discipleship and carrying a tradition forward—in her own voice, as that tradition continues to evolve. The 2003 MELA presentation marked the first collaboration between Marian Zazeela and Choi on a simultaneous light environment.
Marian Zazeela has written about the installation of RICE in her environment Imagic Light II: “During an extended viewing of RICE superposed on my Imagic Light projections in the Dream House, I perceived an ecstatic array of fundamental archetypal images that were generated by the RICE patterns: crystals; swastika; lotus; square; flower (rose), chakra; wheel; spiral; circle; rose window (cathedrals); star; snowflakes: the procession of order out of chaos and back to order that reflects the ebb and flow of all of life.”
La Monte Young wrote about Choi’s live performance of the work at the MELA Dream House on October 14, 2005, as part of the La Monte Young Seventieth-Birthday Celebration:
One of the most fun parts of working with friction sounds is discovering the best sound sources and instruments. We searched for good instruments and she found a resonant metal cooking pot and eventually discovered a long-handled wooden rice paddle in our kitchen that made the sound that she really liked and wanted to develop. At first I thought I was pretty good at articulating the sound but she practiced it so much that she can now perform it better than I can. Jung Hee went inside the universe of the sound and made it her own. She gradually produced multiple recordings of the work, which when played together create the audio environment for RICE. I then suggested she could also present concerts in which she would perform the work live over the audio environment.
Marian and I think the video component of RICE is a masterpiece, and that the audio component is hauntingly beautiful. We decided we liked the work so much that it would be an ideal experience to share on our 70th and 65th+1/2 birthdays. In the guru-disciple relationship it is said that the soul of the guru can be passed on to the disciple. With the passing of the soul to the disciple, the ephemeral essence of the soul is passed on through the transmission of knowledge, both directly and indirectly. By this process, eternity is attained through the transmission of knowledge, tradition and beauty from generation to generation. Thus, through the guru-shishya (disciple) parampara (succession), an eternal stream of pure knowledge with a life and tradition of its own can continue into time and beyond.
Marian and I think the video component of RICE is a masterpiece, and that the audio component is hauntingly beautiful. We decided we liked the work so much that it would be an ideal experience to share on our 70th and 65th+1/2 birthdays. In the guru-disciple relationship it is said that the soul of the guru can be passed on to the disciple. With the passing of the soul to the disciple, the ephemeral essence of the soul is passed on through the transmission of knowledge, both directly and indirectly. By this process, eternity is attained through the transmission of knowledge, tradition and beauty from generation to generation. Thus, through the guru-shishya (disciple) parampara (succession), an eternal stream of pure knowledge with a life and tradition of its own can continue into time and beyond.
In her statement Choi wrote:
RICE contains abstract and non-objective images and sounds. The video is a realization of ever-changing sustained images. There can be an ever-larger number of fluctuations of ever-smaller amplitude. It is not a repetitive optical pattern but a process in time that reflects the self-organizing formation systems used by all living things in nature to create structure. The video is produced independently and has no relationship to the audio other than my intention to exploit the inherent nature of the media concomitantly in the same space-time continuum. Together, the media resonate in the realm of metaphorical sensibility. Over periods of time, relationships gradually emerge: the audience can experience the precise synchronization of video and audio as these elements traverse a reciprocal universality, while the human mind constantly seeks logic and the interrelationship of information.
Jung Hee Choi is an artist/musician and has presented Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest (2007– ), a series of environmental compositions with light, evolving light-point patterns, drawing, incense, performance, and sound. Her work has been presented in the United States, Europe, and Asia including FRAC Franche-Comté, France; Berliner Festspiele, Bundeskunsthalle, Germany; Galerie l’elac, Lausanne, Switzerland; Dia Art Foundation, Guggenheim Museum and MELA Foundation Dream Houses, NYC; FRESH Festival, Bangkok; Korea Experimental Arts Festival. Commissioned by MELA Foundation, her video sound performance and installation, RICE, was chosen as one of The 10 Best of 2003 in the December Artforum. The New York Times wrote about Choi’s multimedia installation Ahata Anahata, Manifest Unmanifest IX at Dia 15 VI 13 545 West 22 Street Dream House, NYC, “With extended listening, what at first seemed mechanically repetitious turns out to be a complex interweaving of different, slowly oscillating pitches. If you give in to it while watching Ms. Choi’s hallucinatory screen, you may find yourself in an altered state of consciousness, on the verge of some ineffable, transcendental revelation.” Choi is the senior disciple of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. In 2002, she co-founded, with Young and Zazeela, The Just Alap Raga Ensemble and, in 2009, The Sundara Trio. Choi’s electroacoustic and modal improvisation ensemble, The Sundara All Star Band, premiered in 2015. The members include Young, Zazeela, Choi, Jon Catler, Hansford Rowe and Naren Budhkar. The New York Times listed Choi’s Tonecycle for Blues performed by her Sundara All Star Band as one of The Best Classical Music Performances of 2017. Choi’s work is in the collection of the FRAC Franche-Comté and Dia Art Foundation. Since 2009, Choi’s long-term multimedia installations have been presented both solo and simultaneously with Young and Zazeela’s sound and light in the MELA Dream House, creating a continuous collaborative environment.
La Monte Young pioneered the concept of extended time durations in 1957 and for over 60 years contributed extensively to the development of just intonation and rational number-based tuning systems in his performance works and the periodic composite sound waveform environments of the Dream House collaborations formulated in 1962 with Marian Zazeela. Presentations of his work in the U.S. and Europe, as well as his theoretical writings gradually had a wide-ranging influence on contemporary music, art and philosophy, including Minimalism, concept art, Fluxus, performance art and conceptual art. In L.A. in the ’50s, Young played jazz saxophone, leading a group with Billy Higgins, Dennis Budimir and Don Cherry. He also played with Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Terry Jennings, Don Friedman, and Tiger Echols. At Yoko Ono’s studio in 1960 he was director of the first New York loft concert series. He was the editor of An Anthology, which with his Compositions 1960 became a primary influence on concept art and the Fluxus movement. In 1962 Young founded his group The Theatre of Eternal Music and embarked on The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, a large work involving improvisation within strict predetermined guidelines. Young and Zazeela helped bring renowned master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath to the U.S. in 1970 and became his first Western disciples. Described by Mark Swed in his October 2009 Los Angeles Times blog as “pure vibratory magic," Young’s Just Alap Raga Ensemble, founded in 2002 with Zazeela and their senior disciple Jung Hee Choi, has become his primary performance vehicle. "For the past quarter of a century he has been the most influential composer in America. Maybe in the world." (Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 1985). "As the acknowledged father of minimalism and guru emeritus to the British art-rock school, his influence is pervasive" (Musician magazine, 1986). “Young is now widely recognized as the originator of the most influential classical music style of the final third of the twentieth century.” (Strickland, Minimalism:Origins, 1993). “La Monte Young: Le Son du Siècle.” (L’Express L’An 2000 Supplement, 1999).
Marian Zazeela is one of the first contemporary artists to use light as a medium of expression. Expanding the traditional concepts of painting and sculpture while incorporating elements of both disciplines, she developed an innovative visual language in the medium of light by combining colored light mixtures with sculptural forms to create seemingly three-dimensional colored shadows in radiant vibrational fields. Zazeela began singing in 1962 with La Monte Young as a founding member of The Theatre of Eternal Music, and performed as vocalist in almost every concert of the ensemble to date, in addition to creating the visual components of Dream House, their collaborative sound and light work. Her major work, The Magenta Lights, has been described in Art Forum as representing “the subtle relationship between precision and spirituality. [She] transforms material into pure and intense color sensations, and makes a perceptual encounter a spiritual experience." With Young in 1970, she brought Pandit Pran Nath to the U.S. and became one of his first Western disciples. She has since performed and taught the Kirana style of Indian classical music and accompanied Pandit Pran Nath in hundreds of concerts throughout the world. Zazeela’s distinctive calligraphic style appears on many of Pran Nath’s concert posters and recordings. Zazeela’s Ornamental Lightyears Tracery has been credited by Glenn Branca in Forced Exposure #16, 1990, and by David Sprague in Your Flesh #28, 1993, to have been the direct influence on Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The Village Voice listed the [Church Street] Dream House as the Best Art Installation in New York 2014, “A charge for the mind as much as for the eye and ear, the Dream House feels like a gift to our beleaguered city, where headspace is the most precious real estate of all.” Zazeela continued to perform as a vocalist until 2018 in The Just Alap Raga Ensemble and The Sundara All Star Band, which she founded with Young and Jung Hee Choi. In 2021 Zazeela was honored as one of the 14 artists to receive the prestigious Anonymous Was A Woman Award in recognition of her significant contributions. Zazeela’s rarely-seen master works on paper were featured at Dia:Beacon from 2019 to 2022, and most recently at Zazeela’s graphic work and abstract calligraphic drawings, spanning from 1962 through 2003, were on view at Artists Space in New York until May 11, 2024.
MELA's programs are made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and generous contributions from individuals and MELA Members.