The moers festival poster was created by the graphic artist Il-Jin ATEM Choi, who was born in Moers in 1981 and who is now based in Frankfurt am Main. The motif consists of various anagrams of the words moers festival applied with spray paint onto 9 removal boxes, which we used to make a little video teaser. Now it´s time we thought, to ask Il-Jin ATEM Choi about his opinions regarding graffiti art.

Il-Jin, When I think of graffiti artists I think of quick effects. How long did the moers festival poster take you? Do you work quickly or do you plan things for a long time?

It depends on the objectives and the artistic intention of the project. I try to make room for both the classic graffiti approach, which is characterised by speed and spontaneity, and for the “slow painting” way of elaborating a picture, which requires a lot of research and conceptualisation in advance. My piece for the moers festival was a relatively long time in the planning (e.g. with regard to how the words should be arranged on the boxes and which anagrams I should use). Actually producing the work with the spray can took more like two days than two weeks.

Do you think that graffiti should have a different cultural status than it currently does? How do you feel about the way this art form is perceived?

As the second question rightly suggests, graffiti is, globally speaking, indeed an art form. Like with any art, the quality of each individual work can only be judged on a case by case basis. Lots of curators, gallery owners and collectors are now doing precisely this, despite all the prejudices surrounding graffiti, and regard a lot of stuff as good and valuable, while other “keepers of the Grail” still dismiss anything related to graffiti as “irrelevant juvenile rubbish” from the outset.
Those works of graffiti which could be deemed to be unrequested, unwanted and which were illegally created in a public space are difficult to judge. They fall into a kind of grey zone, both aesthetically and morally/legally speaking. If a psychologist had to analyse the way graffiti was perceived by society, they’d be sure to diagnose a split personality. Even people who have no idea about art know, for example, that there are extremely artistic works of graffiti being created in the public space (e.g. in Berlin) which are often the result of legally organised art projects. However, there is also a lot of less good beginner’s art out there, which is partly because illegal graffiti in particular is an art form in which the artist gets to exhibit to the public without institutionalised barriers to entry in the shape of curators and gallery owners (Mieke Bal has formulated similar thoughts on this “self-exposure” in the form of graffiti). In this sense, this kind of graffiti is something very democratic, despite its illegality. It all gets artistically interesting when non-beginners produce work in the style of beginners, in an attempt to consciously re-evoke the naive, the raw and the untamed power of what Jean Baudrillard called “empty signifiers”.

Are you working on a project at the moment? If so, what is it?

Generally speaking I’m always working on refining and improving the essence of graffiti writing by finding new and abstract ways of writing my name ATEM. I also have various special projects and ideas for exhibitions that I’m constantly working on. One of them is to spray the entire Declaration of Human Rights onto a wall where the public can see it. If you want to find out more about current projects and exhibitions, I do have a website (which is in urgent need of an overhaul and has been for years), a blog on MySpace, and a facebook page as Il-Jin ATEM Choi (when the opportunity is there, why not use it...). A virtual visit to any of those sites would make me very happy!



E-mail: atem@atemmeta.de

Visit Il-Jin: ATEMMETA.DE or www.myspace.com/atemmeta