Choi Jeong Hwa is an artist and designer who works across the disciplines of visual arts, graphic design, industrial design and architecture. Inspired by the chaos and harmony of the urban environment, he refuses to comply with the hierarchy of the museum, choosing instead to install his pieces outside of buildings. By playing with public spaces, he offers diverse audiences unconditional access to his works, and in so doing raises questions about the privileged environment of art institutions and the prized status of artworks in a capitalist, consumer-centric world.

Inspired by the vibrancy of markets and junk shops, his works in the Happy Happy Project tend to be large-scale installations using everyday and recycled objects, usually plastic or colourful items familiar in daily life. An important piece in the series, Happy Happy Project: Flower Gun looks from a distance like a blooming flower but is in fact made up of 98 plastic toy guns. Playful and fun on the surface but menacing on closer examination, it is a metaphor for the paradoxical world of superficial happiness we live in. Plastic guns, a symbol of violence, are transformed into an alluring object loaded with colour and irony.

Through the installation, Choi explores the questions of “happiness” and the superficiality and unsustainability of excessive consumerism in contemporary society. The raison d’etre of these objects made up of symbols of violence is, ironically, perhaps to elicit a smile and a fleeting sense of joy in the viewer. The sculpture was first unveiled at the 2018 Bangkok Art Biennale and is now on permanent display on the second floor walkway between Parade and The Storeys in One Bangkok.