After spending two decades climbing and eventually dominating the advertising industry in Korea, photographer Joon Choi had carved out a successful life by many accounts - until a chance encounter with Buddha relics completely changed his worldview. Floored by the spectacle of time and humankind’s limited perspective on it (among other things), he was struck by a series of ideas antithetical to everything that propelled him to prosperity in the world of advertisement: Perfection doesn’t exist. Beauty always fades. Life is full of contradictions. These mantras are at the center of Joon Choi’s “Frozen Flower” series, in which choice petals are plucked at the very zenith of their creation, in full bloom, and frozen in ice. Suspended in time and captured on camera, their beauty remains intact, but at a cost.
Preserved forever on the blockchain, this stunning series of 77 NFTs serve as a meditation on the ephemeral nature of beauty and the cycle of life. Similarly, “Frozen Flowers” also serves as a personal diary for Joon Choi’s evolution from a commercial photographer to an artist, and explores the contradictory emotions of anxiety, confidence, and elation we all experience during growth as part of the human
