Exhibition Information

			Where does Sun Choi’s sense of guilt come from? Is it rooted in the memory of perpetrators? Or does it arise from an ethical rupture—one that occurs the moment we recognize our own safety while wars and violence continue to unfold across the world?

Sun Choi’s solo exhibition A Day invokes the temporality of a civilian massacre that unfolded with devastating intensity over the course of a single day in Nogeun-ri in July 1950. Choi does not regard the numerous bullet marks remaining on the outer walls of the site as mere evidence of a past event. They are surfaces upon which time has congealed—traces of violence. The exhibition title A Day points to a specific moment in the past while simultaneously suggesting that any given day in the present can, at any moment, be transformed into a time of violence.

In the eponymous work A Day, bullet marks are rendered as circular holes burned into actual fabric. Rather than depicting the wounds of violence, these holes in the flat surface materially present the path through which a bullet has passed. The circular voids created by fire reveal that the surface—as both shield and support— has been penetrated, while simultaneously implying a state in which the boundary between interior and exterior has collapsed. Here, the holes are not mere images but sites where traces of violence remain—surfaces of absence that expose the moment when the dignity of human life is threatened.

A Day from Nogeun-ri extends into the glasswort painting Puddle. Glasswort, a halophyte, develops a red discoloration as it adapts to high-salinity environments. Though this is a natural phenomenon, Choi uses actual glasswort collected from Taean alongside pigment to leave that redness on the canvas as physical matter. In particular, four large-scale paintings are arranged consecutively on a single wall to form a field of red splatter, positioning the viewer’s body directly before these material traces. The red marks scattered across the canvas acquire layers of meaning that transcend natural phenomena. The red stains leave a material tension evoking wounds and bleeding, and that redness shifts from being a color of nature into a color of affect. The spatters and congealed marks remaining on the canvas surface are not merely brushstrokes; they appear as the residue of violence and as traces of self-recriminating action. This dripping method evokes gestures associated with Abstract Expressionism, yet here the scattering redness is transformed not into personal expression but into matter that evokes the memory of historical violence and ethical tension.

Choi goes further, emphasizing the discourse of corporeality directly within the field of work. In the video A Day, he applies Sujichim (Korean hand acupuncture needles) to his fingers to expose blood’s redness, presenting alongside it a towel used to wipe the blood—its trace oxidized in the air, now turned a dark purplish-black. Here, the blood does not remain merely as a trace of performance but intervenes as material in some of the paintings as well. This gesture reads less as a re-presentation of the image of violence and more as an attempt to experience and record, through his own body, a sense of guilt and vulnerability.

The video Answer, which depicts a figure weeping with a contorted face, forms yet another layer of corporeality. The face in extreme close-up appears as the surface of another exposed to vulnerability, and the absence of sound draws the viewer into a state of ethical tension. In another video work, Korean, most names of South Korean citizens are called up as data by a Processing program and appear on a black screen. As the data values change rapidly, a single name lingers briefly on screen before disappearing, only to be replaced by another. The names emerge and vanish ceaselessly, and viewers come to experience not a particular individual but the flow of life and death intersecting across an entire community. This scene evokes the display of the deceased’s and bereaved families’ names on screens at funeral halls, while simultaneously exposing the reality that not every name can be mourned. This question touches on the political problem of which lives are grievable, recalling what Judith Butler has called “grievability.” The exhibition does not arrange these works in chronological order. The paintings of red splatter and the video of names rapidly cycling on a black screen confront each other within the same space, forming a relationship of tension. The viewer is left standing between the static traces and the rapidly passing names.

And yet, faced with the reality of wars continuing to repeat themselves across the world, we may come to recognize our own powerlessness as individuals. We might even find ourselves aware that, within that very situation, we are engaged in calculations of economic interest and the routines of daily life. Such awareness may sharpen our ethical sensibility; at the same time, it can bring with it a fatigue born of the weight of ethical consciousness and emotional tension in the face of recurring violence.

In A Day, fire-burned holes in cloth, large-scale paintings of red splatter, traces of actual blood, names appearing and being replaced at random, and a face of weeping presented in silence—each employs a different medium. Yet they all converge into a single question about life’s precariousness and the conditions of mourning. Sun Choi’s sense of guilt arises from the recognition that he is not unconnected to these events. Rather than directly re-presenting violence, he positions the viewer within a singular moment—through the surfaces of wounds, through vulnerable bodies, and through names that disappear.

Is that day a day of the past?

Or is it our day, still repeating now?