Yun Choi (b. 1989) works across video, installation, sculpture, and ceramics to weave together the social climates and byproducts generated by Korean modernity. Her practice particularly focuses on the uncanny remnants of popular culture and the temporalities of geopolitics within Korean society, exploring the collective emotions and afterimages embedded within them.
 
Building on this, by collecting, processing, and editing the fragmentary images circulating in Korean society, Choi presents ever-transforming mutant media and objects. Through these, she amplifies and expands the multilayered contexts and phenomena inherent in such imagery.

Yun Choi’s work draws on elements that are ubiquitous in everyday life yet somehow suspicious or uncanny: the flashy advertisements of mobile carriers, the hit songs of K-pop idols, mannequins dressed in hanbok bowing on the street, or the kitschy wallpapers and stickers often found in studio apartments.
 
For example, Kookmin Manifesto (2012–2014) consists of sound and calendar images created by transforming the lyrics of K-pop songs that topped the domestic charts each month from January to December 2011 into the form of oratory speeches. Stripped of their music, the lyrics—now delivered as speeches—resonate over landscape photographs corresponding to each month. For example, in January, IU's 'Good Day' Lyrics with 31 sheets of landscape photography appear.

Yun Choi was struck by news that, at the time, the South Korean government had installed eleven large loudspeakers near the border to blast K-pop songs repeatedly toward North Korea. At the same time, the very same K-pop hits of the month were being endlessly replayed across most of Seoul’s streets.
 
Popular songs, consumed ubiquitously across the nation, move people’s hearts and shape collective psychology through their dazzling melodies and the underlying lyrics. In step with this, K-pop has also come to function domestically and internationally as a tool representing “Korea.”
 
By translating these K-pop lyrics into the rhetoric of oratory and pairing them with the imagery of calendars—objects hung on walls and looked at daily—Choi commemorates them as a kind of contemporary national manifesto (“Kookmin manifestro”).

Alongside this, Yun Choi has frequently incorporated decorative vinyl sheets—commonly seen in everyday settings such as streets or ordinary homes—into her work. Featuring brightly colored images of nature such as red roses, clouds, grass, and stars, these sheets were once ubiquitous across Korea but have gradually disappeared over time.
 
At the time, the artist took particular interest in “point stickers,” a popular form of sheet design that allowed users to peel off individual elements and arrange them into new compositions. These stickers could even be found in unexpected places such as Seoul’s subway stations. Through these artificial images of nature, people decorated buildings with flowers and trees as if tending their own front gardens.

These stickers were accompanied by the phrase: “Peel off each shape and connect them one by one, and your space will transform into a livelier, brighter place.” By placing them in the exhibition space, Yun Choi invited both herself and the audience to create their own flowers, thereby transforming the gallery into a “lively and bright space.”
 
Choi’s consistent interest lies mainly in the things that have been deemed banal which include (public) beautification projects, interior decorations, avocational photography, and Hallyu (the Korean wave). Although these images seem to come from the past or the future, but they are in fact contemporary by-products. They are easily spotted in our daily life but at the same time are invisible if you don’t pay attention, accordingly it produces a sensation of alienation somehow.
 
Choi calls these images ‘media cache.’ The artist has captured, relocated, and rearranged them to delve into how images are originally employed and what the mentality and belief of individual and group users embedded in them.

Yun Choi’s 2017 solo exhibition 《Hanaco, Yunyunchoi, Choi Yun Solo Exhibition》 at Art Sonje Center reflected the artist’s inquiry into the ways cache-images operate. The exhibition unfolded around three figures: “Hanaco,” “Yunyunchoi,” and “Choi Yun.”
 
“Yunyunchoi,” also the name of the artist’s website, took charge of producing and activating images. Much like uploading files to a website, she processed and edited fragments of her work, scattering them throughout the exhibition space in a state always ready to be attached to one another.

‘Hanaco’ is an anonymous character who is ‘not called by the real name’ and has appeared in Choi’s works since 2015. In Hanaco and Mr. Kimchi etc. Playback (2016–), a single playlist which holds together various videos, a character, possibly Hanaco, keeps crossing over time and space as well as acting recklessly and beyond comprehension.
 
In various public spaces, such as museums or city streets, acts of refusal to stand upright—crawling, spinning in circles while taking photographs, or otherwise disorienting spatial orientation—produce fissures by creating dissonance with the sleek, rigid appearance of the world

Such impromptu actions of Hanaco are divided, transformed, and unfolded beyond the walls of the white cube, multiplied into numerous Hanacos and tools. ‘Hanaco,’ a faceless body from the video, is realized in various images of the reality from the encounter with ‘Yunyunchoi’ in the gallery space. The objects from the video are laid out under the title of Performance Tool and Media Cache (2017); the existing Hanaco 50 (2015) is amplified into 100 characters each with 100 printed sheets displayed on the wall.

Choi does not stop there but adds several elements in the gallery space. Shoddy objects that never made it to the scenes of Hanaco and Mr. Kimchi etc. Playback such as a Pikachu doll and food models are transformed and arranged here and there as the ‘media cache’ of the show. Around them cache of the cache that is left behind as residue of data despite countless attempts of elimination, like cache files sticks and functions as the insignificant decoration of SS series (2009–2017) that mimics online videos.
 
Likewise, a greeting robot that awakes a vague déjà-vu—hi-bot (2017)—is standing by the entrance to promote the speed of communication. Window Picture Frame (2017) and Sunflower Wallpaper (2017), as images of complete products often used as interior accessories, are attached on the walls.

In this exhibition, Yun Choi invokes “Yunyunchoi” to join “Hanaco” in presenting the various “caches” that permeate everyday life—things taken for granted, concealed, or forgotten. Within her work, these caches are endlessly repeated, intersected, and expanded, prompting the imagination of multiple realities connected to them.

In her 2020 solo exhibition 《Where the Heart Goes》 at DOOSAN Gallery, Yun Choi explored collective attitudes and emotions toward things perceived as distinctly “Korean.” The exhibition comprised works referencing office partitions, subway screen-door poetry, altered character sculptures, typical interiors of Korean old houses, and public noticeboards, alongside various industrial materials. These elements were combined with bodies in which human and animal or plant forms were entangled, creating a landscape of chaotic intermingling.

These elements were organized in the exhibition into zones of “posting” and “updating.” The “posting” section drew on various types of visual materials that, over time, have appeared or been attached in public spaces, living environments, or online communities. Through these items, displayed to be seen by many, the artist captured how visual power becomes internalized and decorative in everyday life.
 
Between the walls of these posted materials, small fragments detached from Yun Choi’s works had “updated” themselves, growing into human-sized “vertebrates” that occupied the space.

Also, endlessly repeated in the center of the exhibition space are the video work NoticeRevelationLaunchClock (2020), which omnidirectionally sends out infinite digital images, and the sound work Horror Eros Vulgar Spell (2020).
 
The work expresses the fatigue of constantly presenting and reinventing oneself in rapidly changing Korean society by simultaneously playing music that induces sleep and music that prevents it. The loosely partitioned space both restricts and guides the viewer’s sightlines and movement, drawing them into the circular paths of the heart.

The work Where the Heart Goes (2021), produced the following year, depicts a scene in which several grandmothers wander through an empty exhibition space after the exhibition has ended. These “grandmothers” are actually young people in elderly disguises, representing an image that is at once a grandmother and not a grandmother—a grotesque manifestation of the concept of “grandmother,” independent of authenticity.
 
In this context, the “grandmother” can be seen as a personification of the caches left behind in a society accelerated to the point where things quickly become outdated. Through these figures, Yun Choi asks where our hearts are directed in a world that constantly demands we revise and present ourselves anew.

Meanwhile, Choi’s recent work SamsungTVGalaxy46” (Background Music: Bitcoin and Blackhole) (2024) is derived from Samsung Electronics, which has continuously released products under the name ‘Galaxy’ with the name ‘Samsung’ meaning ‘three stars.’ The six panels are essentially 46 inch televisions cast baked with a bit of coin, copper wires, various metals, and metal oxides in black soil.
 
When zinc oxide, quartz and all other materials meet, crystals form fluidly and grow during the ‘soaking hour,’ a period where a certain temperature remains still. These paired panels were set to different soaking times, each embodying a distinct temporal essence.
 
In contemporary society, people are engrossed in ‘screen time,’ staring at countless displays rather than gazing at the starry night to measure time. Choi approaches moving images with the time of the deep underground and the universe, far removed from the earth's surface, by imagining the minerals sending signals behind television screens.

(Background Music: Bitcoin and Blackhole) paired with SamsungTVGalaxy46”, ), is streamed online during the exhibition period. The audience, receiving data with a series of delayed times and various noises, decides which world to connect to through a period of immersion.
 
The oxidised wires and melted coins embedded in the fake television, SamsungTVGalaxy46” (Background Music: Bitcoin and Black Hole), resemble a shamanistic object akin to a bronze mirror, positioned opposite to fetishism. It attempts to capture the vastness that eludes grasp, presenting distant information in darkness rather than light.

In the rapidly changing landscape of Korean society, things once longed for or admired quickly become trivial, outdated, and almost laughable. These remnants accumulate in society as “cache,” at times evoking both amusement and fear. Yun Choi collects and weaves these lingering, fragile, and shabby caches to peer into the inner workings of contemporary minds.

 “Caches are what remain after production and consumption. They are difficult to discard, reemerge even when thrown away, and gradually accumulate, becoming troublesome. Over time, the distinction between what is the cache and what is not grows increasingly blurred. I believe the strangely mutated contemporary landscapes I explore are formed by such caches of emotion accumulating in people’s minds.”     (Yun Choi, interview in 《Young Korean Artist 2021》, MMCA)

Yun Choi received B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Korea National University of Arts. Her solo exhibitions include 《The Lounge》 (CALM - Centre d’Art La Meute, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2023), 《Running at the Speed of Light, the Body Becomes a Turtle》 (LUX, London, 2022), 《Walking the Dead End》 (DOOSAN Gallery New York, New York, 2020), 《Where The Heart Goes》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2020), and 《Hanaco, Yunyunchoi, Choi Yun Solo Exhibition》 (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2017).
 
She has also participated in numerous exhibitions, including 《A Faraway Today》 (Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《2024 Art Spectrum: Dream Screen》 (Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), Busan Biennale 2024 《Seeing in the Dark》 (Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum, Busan, 2024), 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale 《THIS TOO, IS A MAP》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023), 《Funky-Functions》 (Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, 2022), and 《Young Korean Artists 2021》 (MMCA, Gwacheon, 2021).
 
Yun Choi has participated as an artist-in-residence at the European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) (Oisterwijk, Netherland, 2023), the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2021–2023), Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (Seoul, 2021), and DOOSAN Residency New York (New York, USA, 2020). Her works are held in the collections of the Seoul Museum of Art, the Seo-Seoul Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan.

References

• 최윤, Yun Choi (Artist Website)
• 네마프, 국민 매니페스토 (Nemaf, Kookmin Manifesto)
• 아트선재센터, [서문] 하나코, 윤윤최, 최윤 개인전 (Art Sonje Center, [Preface] Hanaco, Yunyunchoi, Choi Yun Solo Exhibition)
• 퍼블릭아트, 권혁규 – 최윤, 윤윤최, 하나코
• 두산갤러리, [서문] 마음이 가는 길 (DOOSAN Gallery, [Preface] Where the Heart Goes)
• 국립현대미술관, 동시대 미술의 오늘과 내일 《젊은 모색 2021》 인터뷰 3편