Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Choi held her first solo exhibition, 《Torso》, at Kim Chong Yung Museum in 2016. Since then, she has presented solo shows including 《Orange Podium》 (Audio Visual Pavilion, Seoul, 2018), 《Disillusionment of 11am》 (Thomas Park Gallery, New York, 2019), 《Vivid Cuts》 (P21, Seoul, 2021), and 《Cornering》 (Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2022), consistently deepening her inquiry into materiality, function, and sculpture.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Her work has been featured in major group exhibitions such as 《Objects: Sculptural Attempts》 (Doosan Gallery, 2017), 《Refrigerator Fantasy》 (Asia Culture Center, 2017), 《Point Counter Point》 (Art Sonje Center, 2018), 《Sensory Sensibility》 (Arko Art Center, 2019), 《Strange Everyday》 (Culture Station Seoul 284, 2020), 《White Rhapsody (Wooran Foundation, 2020), 《Sculptural Impulse》 (Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, 2022), 《Offsite》 (Art Sonje Center, 2023), 《Unfamiliar Without Borders》 (Urban Sculpture Festival, 2024), and the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale (2024).

Awards (Selected)

In 2016, Choi was selected for the Visual Arts category by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture and was also named a “Creative Young Artist” by the Kim Tschang-Yeul Museum. She participated in a workshop at Arko Art Center (2015) and completed a one-month residency at Art Space O. These recognitions reflect her consistent exploration of material politics and spatial intervention.

Residencies (Selected)

Choi was a resident artist at Geumcheon Art Factory (9th cohort, 2017–2018) and Nanji Residency (13th cohort, 2019), where she further developed her investigations into material systems, urban topology, and sculptural process.

Originality & Identity

Goen Choi explores the systems of contemporary materiality by collecting and reconfiguring discarded everyday objects—primarily white goods and industrial materials—into sculptural forms. Her work begins with a focus on things that have been marginalized or cast aside in our urban environment. She believes that while we seem to enjoy a wide range of choices in modern consumer society, we are ultimately trapped in a self-repeating chain created by cultural, economic, and social conditions—a situation she describes metaphorically as "Alice in Chains."

Rather than reinforcing the illusion of autonomy, Choi seeks to expose the coded efficiency and silent violence embedded within mass-produced commodities. By working with obsolete appliances, pipes, and furniture, she reflects on the invisible systems that govern material flow, standardization, and human interaction in urban settings. Her practice serves not only as a critique of contemporary consumption but also as a tactile inquiry into the nature of matter itself.

Style & Contents

Choi’s sculptural language is grounded in the physical acts of cutting, disassembling, and reassembling. Her early series Material Pool (2016–) involved dismembering refrigerators and air conditioners to reorient their heavy, vertical structures into low-lying horizontal forms, subverting their original logic. In White Series (2018), she displayed the stripped-down exteriors of discarded standing air conditioners in a line against the gallery wall, revealing subtle differences in color and size—markers of age, use, and production.

Cutting, in particular, is a central sculptural gesture in Choi’s practice. Works such as Cut (2021), Trophy (2022), and Gloria (2024) involve slicing copper pipes, unfolding and warping their sleek industrial forms, and making visible the material’s interior and infrastructure. Her use of pre-existing materials highlights both the memory embedded in their surfaces and the standardization they underwent as commodities.

Her sculptures respond actively to the exhibition environment. For example, in the solo exhibition 《Vivid Cuts》 (P21, 2021), the installation layout was heavily influenced by the architectural character of the two exhibition rooms—a pristine white cube and a raw cement space. Rather than treating sculpture as isolated object, Choi allows her works to physically interact with and divide the gallery space, activating the viewer’s spatial perception and engagement.

Topography & Continuity

Choi’s materials are sourced from city outskirts, recycling yards, and secondhand marketplaces—locations where obsolete materials accumulate. This practice is not simply about reusing objects, but tracing and revealing the societal logic and economic topographies that shape their journeys. In White Home Wall (2018), she arranged stripped appliance panels by year of manufacture, creating a sculptural timeline within the gallery.

Her later works, such as Sunbake (2023) and Gloria (2024), move beyond the gallery’s interior and expand into the exterior architecture. Copper pipes stretch across building façades, embedding themselves into the urban infrastructure and highlighting the “vascular” system of cities. By reversing the directionality of function—cutting, folding, twisting—Choi transforms industrial components into speculative landscapes that make the invisible visible.

In this way, her sculptures don't simply negate function—they retain traces of their past lives, prompting viewers to sense how the systems we inhabit standardize and define not just objects, but us. The more she cuts, the more clearly those hidden systems come into view—like Alice, still trapped in the chains.