The exhibition S O R I (sound) evokes the vividness of life via two routes: digital condensation of sounds of individuals pronouncing their own name and projection of landscape images taken through lens covered with the artist’s blood drop. The Korean title refers to the human breath at the heart of their experience, from the most intimate to the most vast level (atmosphere), from being unscathed to being threatened (historical events), from the striking to the abstract (communication). Sori is given as a set of audible and visual facts of life which often escapes our habitual consciousness.
In 2021, with the artwork Sori, the Korean artist Sun Choi gave himself a particular task of gathering and assembling the voices of 20,000 inhabitants of Doksan district in Seoul pronouncing their own name. Although particular, its core idea is not new to him: allowing his works to extend the intensity of his primary aesthetic experience in reality and towards his audience and leading them to remain at the limits of metaphor. Sori (sound), which at the same time fills and disperses itself in the atmosphere, obliges him: the concentrated sound, emitted once every minute from 4 Bluetooth speakers, resembles the sound of thunder and falls down without any representative or favorable trace. These pronounced names speaks only through the lives sensitized to sounds of life that are just as ephemeral as it is imperceptible.
Flower (2021) consists of a continued audiovisual projection of reddened images filmed with the artist’s smartphone camera. Each of these images shows at different interval the progressive change of color resulting from clotting blood drop – simultaneously vivid and perishing – of the artist covering the lens. In front of the window next to the projection is the suspended transparent film sheet which eclipses the landscape of the declining district.
Butterflies (2014 – 2022) started out in 2014 as a project whose aim is to visualize each breath of immigrant workers that the artist met on the streets of Ansan, Korea. The work came about as a result of the artist’s feeling of futility and nonsense regarding various social events. It brings forth a strong visual experience of human breath to do away with notional understanding of human affairs and has also been carried out in many parts of the world.
Very often Sun Choi would extract materials from real events and treat it as an undeniable fact to be brought directly into the exhibition space. The work requires our attentional and physiological engagement towards the material, allowing it to speak for the events they were extracted from. For example, in his White Painting (Pig’s Painting), he spreads gooey lard over multiple sheets of paper conjoined to form a large wall to tell a story of millions of pigs buried alive following the outbreak of African swine fever. Their existence having been reduced to serial numbers, Choi typewrites them in small magenta letters and lists them in his book Magenta Painting (2021). His insistence is upon his own inability to remain a mere spectator to the tragedy.
Hence his brutally realist view of art. Art, in his view, allows for exercising our capacities to establish a personal relationship with reality, to the point where it defamiliarizes and makes us rethink the status of our factual comprehensions of the world. Choi’s method consists not only in expanding the threshold of his intuition, but also that of his understanding of the significations of the historical events whose truth can only be approached by the sense provided by the material medium as facts of experience. In his effort to extract a sense that does not lie, to do away with the idea that art and aestheticization can take precedence over experience, Choi visits the sites of real events, with the imperative of liberating himself from the phenomenological conditions to share the taste of their truth, presents and gives voice to the paradoxically aestheticized but never encrypted material of experience.
Jimin Son, Associate Professor, Philosophy of Art.
Sun Choi, You Can Continue to Breathe at the Ending Point of My Breath, 2011, drawings installation, Japanese people’s breath,
India ink on paper, 79 x 872 cm, unique pieces
Sun Choi, You Can Continue to Breathe at the Ending Point of My Breath, 2011, drawings installation, Japanese people’s breath,
India ink on paper, 79 x 872 cm, unique pieces
Non Drawn Painting, 2022, oriental pigment and gelatin on duvet covers which saltmakers used, 268 x 180 cm, unique pieces
Magenta Painting, 2021, 400 pages book made by numbers of killed pigs (first book from three books), cover made in pig skin, pages made in translucent paper,
digital laser pigment printing, 26 x 19,5 x 2,5 cm,
unique piece (prototype on the exhibition)
Naked painting , 2000, mixed media on canvas, 155 x 100 cm, unique piece
Sun Choi, You Can Continue to Breathe at the Ending Point of My Breath, 2011, drawings installation, Japanese people’s breath,
India ink on paper, 79 x 872 cm, unique pieces
Sun Choi, You Can Continue to Breathe at the Ending Point of My Breath, 2011, drawings installation, Japanese people’s breath,
India ink on paper, 79 x 872 cm, unique pieces
Non Drawn Painting, 2022, oriental pigment and gelatin on duvet covers which saltmakers used, 268 x 180 cm, unique pieces
Magenta Painting, 2021, 400 pages book made by numbers of killed pigs (first book from three books), cover made in pig skin, pages made in translucent paper, digital laser pigment printing, 26 x 19,5 x 2,5 cm, unique piece (prototype on the exhibition)
Sun Choi, You Can Continue to Breathe at the Ending Point of My Breath, 2011, drawings installation, Japanese people’s breath,
India ink on paper, 79 x 872 cm, unique pieces
Sun Choi, You Can Continue to Breathe at the Ending Point of My Breath, 2011, drawings installation, Japanese people’s breath,
India ink on paper, 79 x 872 cm, unique pieces
Sun Choi, Non Drawn Painting, 2022, oriental pigment and gelatin on duvet covers which saltmakers used, 268 x 180 cm, unique pieces
Magenta Painting, 2021, 400 pages book made by numbers of killed pigs (first book from three books), cover made in pig skin, pages made in translucent paper, digital laser pigment printing, 26 x 19,5 x 2,5 cm, unique piece (prototype on the exhibition)
Sun Choi, Magenta Painting, 2021, 400 pages book made by numbers of killed pigs (first book from three books), cover made in pig skin, pages made in translucent paper, digital laser pigment printing, 26 x 19,5 x 2,5 cm, unique piece (prototype on the exhibition)
Sun Choi, You Can Continue to Breathe at the Ending Point of My Breath, 2011, drawings installation, Japanese people’s breath,
India ink on paper, 79 x 872 cm, unique pieces
Magenta Painting, 2021, 400 pages book made by numbers of killed pigs (first book from three books), cover made in pig skin, pages made in translucent paper, digital laser pigment printing, 26 x 19,5 x 2,5 cm, unique piece (prototype on the exhibition)
pièce unique (prototype sur l’exposition)
Naked painting , 2000, mixed media on canvas, 155 x 100 cm, unique piece
Sun Choi, Naked painting , 2000, mixed media on canvas,
155 x 100 cm, unique piece
Sun Choi, Sickness circle, 2014, video, color, mute, loop, edition of 5 + 2 AP
Sun Choi, Sickness 1, 2017, digital pigment printing on 245g RCP satine paper, frame, glass, 50 x 70 cm each, edition of 5 + 2 AP
Sickness 2, 2017, digital pigment printing on 245g RCP satine paper, frame, glass, 50 x 70 cm each, edition of 5 + 2 AP
Sickness circle, 2014, video, color, mute, loop, edition of 5 + 2 AP
Sun Choi, Sickness 1, 2017, digital pigment printing on 245g RCP satine paper, frame, glass, 50 x 70 cm each, edition of 5 + 2 AP
Sickness 2, 2017, digital pigment printing on 245g RCP satine paper, frame, glass, 50 x 70 cm each, edition of 5 + 2 AP
Sun Choi, Sickness circle, 2014, video, color, mute, loop, edition of 5 + 2 AP
Nest, 2022, Nest, 2022, gelatin, food color, artificial flavoring, LED light, table, variable dimensions, unique pieces (prototype for this exhibition)
Sickness sound, 2017, video, color, mute, loop, edition of 5 + 2 AP
Sun Choi, Nest, 2022, gelatin, food color, artificial flavoring, LED light, table,
variable dimensions, unique pieces (prototype for this exhibition)
Sun Choi, Flower 2021, 2021, single chanel video, color, mute, blood of the artist on lens, 1’35’’, loop, edition of 5 + 2 AP
Sori, 2021, translated 20,000 people’s name to sound on 10 bluetooth speakers, micro SD card, 1’00’’, loop 1 time every minute,
4 pieces on this exhibition, edition of 5 + 2 AP
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