Doors by Choi Jeong-Hwa – A sculpture featuring 1,000 doors arranged in mosaic fashion on a building
1,000 doors, but which to choose?
We all want freedom until it’s time to choose.
A white, wooden door opens up
Revealing a room disheveled and unkempt.
I recognize it as my own,
But back away to continue searching the unknown.
Glass and hardwood for the next one
And I don’t know why it draws me in.
Voices on the other side quickly reply,
But those memories need to be kept far from the eye.
A new door, decorated, red, and shiny, beckons next.
Something new, something complex.
On the other side is a city filled with busybodies and bustling with life.
But would the flurry and loneliness bring me too much strife?
Another one, plain and comfortable
catches my eye and seems approachable.
I see myself and kids, laughing, running, then crying.
But I look so young, could I be happy in something less binding?
I reach the top floor, where whipping winds wreak havoc,
Where most do not dare to go.
And one door, the knob barely hanging on calls forth.
Of this one, the voice is demanding and shakes me to my core.
I reach the end of the hallway and can see straight through.
This door wouldn’t stop the weakest of intruders.
I grab the handle and pull and push, waiting for something to happen,
But on the other side, there are still 10 stories to concrete.
I walk back down, cursed with the choice of 1,000 doors,
Hoping the freedom of choice doesn’t lead me back to the top door.
This poem does not, in any way, match up with the meaning intended by the artist. The actual meaning is quite ambiguous and has been interpreted in several ways. My take was interpreting the doors as choices. A thousand doors are a lot of doors. One interesting aspect of this sculpture is that, from far away, it looks like a pixilated image. The doors themselves get lost in a broader view of them. I was also drawn to how the doors change as you get closer to the top. The removed windows are filled on the lower floors by the building behind them. The doors near the top, however, have nothing behind them, making them look more like an empty frame than a door. I chose to use rhyme schemes in the parts with “normal” choices but to break it off towards the end to make the reader feel uncomfortable.