Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Choi’s 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).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Choi 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).

Residencies (Selected)

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).

Collections (Selected)

Choi’s 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.

Originality & Identity

Yun Choi’s practice captures the residues of collective psyche produced by Korean modernity/postmodernity and reassembles them into a mutant worldview. The early video work Kookmin Manifesto (2012–2014) converts the monthly hit K-pop lyrics of 2011 into oratory and overlays them with calendar landscapes, revealing popular music as an apparatus that mobilizes “national” affect. Wall Sticker—Self-Adhesive Wall Decoration (2014) couples kitschy “fake nature” motifs—roses, clouds, stars—with participatory assembly, transplanting into the gallery the process by which vernacular desire adheres to and proliferates across city and home.

In 《Hanaco, Yunyunchoi, Choi Yun Solo Exhibition》 (Art Sonje Center, 2017), the artist differentiates her personae into “Hanaco/Yunyunchoi/Choi Yun,” testing at the level of subjectivity the circuits through which image production, circulation, and residue transmute into one another. The torsion between public surfaces and private desires is heightened in Hanaco and Mr. Kimchi etc. Playback (2016–). Hanaco’s gestures—refusing upright posture to crawl, spinning while taking photographs—introduce micro-misalignments into normative urban movement, unsettling the power of what is seen and what is made to be seen. Ready-made images such as hi-bot (2017), Window Picture Frame (2017), and Sunflower Wallpaper (2017) operate as paradoxical “evidence,” exposing the everyday machinery of illusion inside the gallery.

《Where the Heart Goes》 (DOOSAN Gallery, 2020) anatomizes collective affect along two axes—“posting” and “updating.” NoticeRevelationLaunchClock (2020) and Horror Eros Vulgar Spell (2020) embody, through polyphonic sound and image, the clash between sensory fatigue and arousal induced by ads, warnings, and slogans; fragments scattered through the space “update” into human-scaled “vertebrates,” capturing the instant when residue turns into a biological metaphor. The “grandmothers” of Where the Heart Goes (2021) personify leftover affect suspended or excluded by rapid cycles of renewal, questioning the direction of the heart in a society that “endlessly revises and presents itself anew.”

SamsungTVGalaxy46” (Background Music: Bitcoin and Blackhole) (2023–2024) reverses the age of screen time into the time of minerals and ceramics. Panels assigned distinct soaking durations hold the temporalities of galaxies and “dark light,” while the online streaming sound, through delay and noise, delegates to viewers the sensory decision of “which world to connect to.” Here, residue is not mere discard; it becomes a mode of world-connection, varied through the mediations of matter–time–data.

Style & Contents

Across photography, video, installation, sound, and ceramics, form reproduces the logic of content. The “music-less recitation” and calendar imagery of Kookmin Manifesto disassemble and recombine hearing/seeing to render the ideology of “national listening” transparent. Wall Sticker—Self-Adhesive Wall Decoration adopts an assemble-by-peeling method that allows viewers to bodily apprehend how segmented signs compose imagined nature within living spaces.

In 《Hanaco, Yunyunchoi, Choi Yun Solo Exhibition》, gestures in video (Hanaco and Mr. Kimchi etc. Playback) are translated into material arrays such as Performance Tool and Media Cache (2017) and Hanaco 100 (2017). Cross-work reuse visualizes, as the exhibition’s very structure, the loops of the image economy. The appropriation of promotional devices like hi-bot returns the slogans of communication/speed/positivity to the exhibition’s point of entry—the first scene of the visitor’s route.

In 《Where the Heart Goes》, physical media—partitions, subway screen-door poems, public noticeboards—perform a dual role as apparatus and subject. The layered sound–image of NoticeRevelationLaunchClock and Horror Eros Vulgar Spell reduces the contradiction of “perpetual updating” to auditory fatigue by counterposing sleep-inducing and sleep-preventing music. Subsequently, Where the Heart Goes stages an empty gallery as a set, deploying performers to realize a spectral realism that loosens the boundaries of temporal authenticity and identity.

SamsungTVGalaxy46” (Background Music: Bitcoin and Blackhole) objectifies the ceramic processes of heating, oxidation, and crystallization as a screen-object, foregrounding the “time that makes surfaces” rather than content. The residual materiality of metal oxides, coins, and wires inscribes the intersections of data–mineral–capital onto the skin, while the real-time modulated streaming of the background music formally guarantees that “sensory posting/updating” continues beyond the gallery and across networks.

Topography & Continuity

Through the collection, reallocation, and reuse of “cache-images,” Choi has established a distinctive lexicon that links the vernacular apparatuses of Korean society (K-pop, wall stickers, greeting robots, public boards) with individual affect. This is identifiable within contemporary Korean art as an “aesthetics of residue” that traverses image-politics and everyday surfaces, made visible through an installational grammar shuttling between the white cube and urban public skins.

In terms of trajectory, the work expands from the critique of listening/reading and public surfaces (Kookmin Manifesto, 2012–2014; Wall Sticker—Self-Adhesive Wall Decoration, 2014), to the self-propagation of personae and residue (《Hanaco, Yunyunchoi, Choi Yun Solo Exhibition》, 2017), to the apparatus of posting/updating (《Where the Heart Goes》, 2020), and toward materially screened works integrating matter–time–data (SamsungTVGalaxy46” …, 2023–2024).

The consistent pillars across Choi’s practice are (1) persistent observation of the political economy of everyday images, (2) redistribution and reuse of residue, and (3) the choreographing of spectator movement and surfaces. Her work is recognized within the Korean art scene not as schematic satire of local kitsch, but as a mediating capacity that cross-translates sensation, affect, and time on the surfaces of everyday life.