Houston artist JooYoung Choi has almost lost track of how many zany characters she is living with during the pandemic. They crowd her home and studio, mostly kept in boxes. Invariably, some hog the furniture and fill her head night and day.
Choi has made soft-sculpture creatures of felt, fleece and furry stuff for years now, including puppets that appear alongside her in animated music videos, fill her installations and inspire paintings — all of it based on an alternative fantasy world called the Cosmic Womb. Choi appears as C.S. Watson, an Earthling who, like her, was born in South Korea, adopted as an infant and raised by a white family in Concord, New Hampshire. Until now, the enterprise has focused on her own voyage of self-discovery and empowerment.
Choi’s universe is expanding exponentially with her new video, “Spectra Force Vive: Infinite Pie Delivery Service.” The project has mushroomed into a three-part epic that will eventually run an hour and 40 minutes, based on a script she has whittled to 88 pages. The 30-minute Episode 1 premieres Nov. 18-22, streamed free by Aurora Picture Show.
Creating “Spectra Force Vive” has been cathartic during a year of exceptional stresses — the pandemic, the protests, the ugliness of the country’s political divide, she says. “It’s about characters who come together and do their best to take care of each other, speak out and fight against injustice.”
When: Streams Nov. 18-22; Zoom talk 5 p.m. Nov. 20 with JooYoung Choi and Genevieve Quick
Details: Free; aurorapictureshow.org
Any of Choi’s new puppets would be at home on “Sesame Street” if “Sesame Street” had an intergalactic theme. They don’t look human but have purposefully diverse human aspects, representing a spectrum of people whose differences are based on race, gender identity, physical abilities, you name it. She has made about 120 puppets. The video has a primary cast of about 12, with 33 supporting characters and 46 more who appear for five seconds or less. “When I wrote the script, I kept thinking I could solve problems by adding more characters,” Choi says. “I need better storytelling techniques!”
Rethinking the superhero
The new characters came to her as she spoke with girls, women and non-binary people about identity, seeking to understand their feelings about how they are represented in the media, including the fantasy films Choi loves. “You can’t go back to your art after that without it feeding into what you’re doing,” she says. Using C.S. Watson as a superhero suddenly was problematic. “She’s this white-skinned savior. I play her as live action with puppets as sidekicks that she saves. I wanted a more symbiotic situation, where they could help each other.”
On a mission she couldn’t ignore, she dove into the project even before finding out she had received grants to support it from the Idea Fund and the City of Houston.
To make the “Spectra Force Vive” characters as authentic as possible, Choi enlisted voice actors from around the world whose life situations reflect those of the main puppets. Voiceover communities are addressing white-washing in their industry like nearly everyone else, she says. “It made me step back and think about TV shows I saw as an Asian kid that might have been voiced by white people pretending to be Asian. I don’t want others to go through that. It really wasn’t that hard to find the cast.”
A biracial, transgender cousin inspired the character Volkana. Another member of the force, Twist, is missing a leg; that part is voiced by an actor in Europe who has a prosthetic leg and also brought the intrigue of an unusual Belgian-African accent. “There was just something about the journey. These things weren’t limiting,” Choi says. “It’s one thing to think about inclusivity, but this is about trying to do something where everyone can come along and be welcomed.”
As her inter-galactic population grew, she ditched her original idea of creating just five new superheroes and came up with the name Spectra Force Vive for the core group. “Vive” rhymes with five but alludes to positive life energy. “The whole thing is about infinity… and how we have infinite possibilities within ourselves, so why limit the name of the group to a number?” Choi says. The heroes are running a D.I.Y. business, the Infinite Pie Delivery Service, as they search a galaxy for lost or stolen “heart songs” that might revive their destroyed home planets.
Technical headaches
The project’s technical challenges are not quite infinite, but daunting. Choi operates the puppets herself, filming each separately and layering them with animated characters and human actors against both miniature and digitally-created backgrounds. She made about 9,000 black and white drawings for the animations. “I get weirded out thinking about it,” Choi says. Timing fight scenes was especially challenging, she adds. “And I’m only doing about six frames per second, not the standard animation speed of 24.”
The Aurora Picture Show screenings include a behind-the-scenes segment, and Choi will appear live during a Zoom talk with another well-known interdisciplinary artist, Genevieve Quick.
Choi can’t think about too much else until she finishes the next two episodes of “Spectra Force Vive,” but there’s a growing demand for her work from collectors. This summer, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art acquired “Time for You and Joy to Get Acquainted,” the big soft-sculpture she created for a show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2017. Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art will present her next show of paintings, whenever they’re ready.
After all that she’s done to create and film “Spectra Force Vibe,” the expanded cast of characters won’t be the only new elements in her canvases, Choi says. “My painting process will never be the same.”
molly.glentzer@chron.com
You must be signed in to comment
Sign In