Goen Choi (b.1985) begins her work by revisiting things that have been pushed to the margins. She collects and reassembles discarded appliances, pipes, and furniture, placing them in new spatial contexts. Her works, which evoke a sense of the familiar and the unfamiliar, attempt to reveal the presence of materials that shape the urban environment, yet remain hidden beneath the surface of today’s digital age.

Goen Choi’s work stems from a desire to examine the superficial emotions she has experienced—feelings difficult to understand or digest—within the systematized structure of urban life. In an interview, Choi likened the contemporary ecological environment to “Alice in Chains,” referring to Alice trapped in a never-ending cycle of systems with no way out.

In other words, although we seem to be offered a wide array of choices today, our consumer experiences ultimately remain confined within the loops created by contemporary cultural, economic, and social systems. With this in mind, Choi began observing and collecting mass-produced, discarded goods—especially electronic appliances—and developed sculptural works that expose the embedded systems of capital and social codes within these products.

In the early stages of her practice, Goen Choi focused primarily on static indoor objects. For example, her series ‘Material Pool’, which began in 2016, involves dismantling and reassembling white goods such as refrigerators and air conditioners. Through this process, she transforms the inherent conditions and structural logic of these objects.

In this work, Choi attempts to break down the structural order of heavy, vertically oriented appliances like refrigerators. For instance, she cuts the refrigerator body in half from the front, lays the sliced section horizontally on the floor, and reconfigures it into a low, platform-like sculpture—resembling a bench or plinth.

By disrupting the familiar forms and logic of standardized objects that are deeply integrated into our daily lives, these works evoke a sense of estrangement.

Following rapid economic growth, South Korea constructed large-scale standardized apartment complexes to accommodate a high population within limited land. As a result, daily life became increasingly homogenized to fit this environment. Furniture, which is typically designed in response to the human body and its movements, came to be mass-produced according to the standardized dimensions of apartment spaces, rather than individual physical needs.

Goen Choi disassembles and reconfigures these mass-produced, standardized objects, examining subtle variations in color and dimensions with an almost archaeological gaze. Through this process, she invites reflection on the underlying conditions that determine such uniformity.

Goen Choi’s representative series ‘White’ (2018) began with collecting discarded standing air conditioners found on the outskirts of cities, in junkyards, and on secondhand websites. The artist stripped the white, standardized outer shells from the appliances and displayed them upright against the walls of the exhibition space.

Lined up side by side, these shells reveal subtle variations in size and discoloration accumulated over time—traces of their individual histories. At the same time, the scene of these similar yet slightly different objects, now recontextualized as sculptural fragments, makes their standardized features even more visible. It reminds us that we are all navigating a world shaped by homogenized choices.

In the ‘White Home Wall’ (2017–) series, presented during the group exhibition 《Point Counter Point》 at Art Sonje Center in 2018, the outer shells of white standing air conditioners were installed overhead, stretching across the exhibition space like a white wall.

By cutting the bodies of the air conditioners and rearranging them in chronological order of their production years, the artist organized the components according to a specific set of rules. This process redivided the exhibition space into new lines and planes.

Originally designed through efficient industrial processes to intervene in domestic living spaces, these mass-produced products are recontextualized through Choi’s sculptural interventions, now engaging with the spatial dimensions of the gallery.

Goen Choi states, “If the first phase of the work is completed in the studio, then the process of the work finding its place within the exhibition space is the second phase.” In other words, she approaches her work not as something fixed or fully defined, but as something flexible and responsive to its surroundings.

Working with objects we touch and use in everyday life, Choi sets up her installations to establish physical relationships with the audience and the surrounding environment. In some exhibitions, viewers were invited to sit on or touch the works as they would with household objects. In 《Silky Navy Skin》 (Insa Art Space, 2016), for example, her sculptures were physically overlapped and installed in conjunction with works by three other participating artists.

In this way, Goen Choi treats familiar, mass-produced objects as sculptural materials, reconfiguring them into minimal, geometric forms regardless of their original function. By uncovering formal qualities within discarded and obsolete consumer goods, her work abstracts these items into an artistic context, while simultaneously preserving the standardized traces embedded in their bodies and the marks of time once spent in someone’s home—thus inherently carrying social narratives.

In an interview, Choi explained that she chooses to work with standardized products because she finds the “circumstances or conditions under which materials are handled” to be crucial. At the core of her practice, which reveals the objectivity of contextualized materials, lies a fundamental question: what does it mean for a material to be ‘pure’ within today’s vast systems of distribution, consumption, and use?

Goen Choi later turned her attention to marble as a contemporary material that bears the traces of today’s vast industrial systems. While marble is undeniably a natural substance, it is treated as a product with potential for commodification from the very beginning of its production process. Stones that were once part of a mountain across the sea are supplied to interior design companies and distributed with precise 2-centimeter slicing marks.

From these traces, the artist began to imagine the spectacular dimensions of time and space hidden behind everyday objects. In this line of thought, Goen Choi explored how materials are produced and used in today’s world, turning her attention to stone.

For instance, her work Dominant Stripes (2020) and the ‘Testa’ (2021–) series, which utilize widely distributed imported marble, replicate the forms of household appliances such as wall-mounted air conditioners and pressure rice cookers. These works evoke a sense of estrangement while simultaneously calling attention to the vast industrial systems that underpin and shape their existence.

In her 2021 solo exhibition 《Vivid Cuts》 at P21, Goen Choi presented works that focused on the act of cutting objects. Among them, Cut (2021) utilized copper pipes—a quintessential material of contemporary industry. Choi sliced straight copper pipes and unfolded them outward, extending from the floor to the walls and segmenting the space in multiple directions.

The serial numbers printed on the surface hint at the object’s origin as a standardized, mass-produced product. However, through the act of cutting and the exposure of raw cross-sections, its original form and function dissolve.

Works such as Cut and Trophy, which employed copper pipes typically used in plumbing systems, marked a turning point in Goen Choi’s practice. These pieces not only foreground the physical acts of cutting and unfolding but also capture the inherent sense of movement embodied by the pipe as an object.

By focusing on the pipe’s function as a conduit—something that carries and mediates within the urban infrastructure—Choi expanded her sculptural language beyond the interior of the exhibition space to engage with its exterior as well. This shift highlights her growing interest in spatial intervention and in materials that serve as both carriers of function and metaphor.

Once confined within the interiors of buildings, the pipes in Choi’s works are exposed and externalized, claiming architectural surfaces as their support and extending their presence into the surrounding space. As the artist explains, pipes—"materials that branch out across the city like blood vessels to form the urban technological system"—offered her a key to unraveling the physicality of technologies often perceived as intangible. 

Her recent work Gloria (2024) emerges from this desire to confront and reimagine the hidden systems beneath contemporary life. In this piece, Choi cuts open and inverts the inside and outside of pipes, distorting their characteristically clean, industrial lines through applied force or heat. By bending, twisting, and disabling their function, she displaces what was once peripheral or concealed, bringing it to the center in raw material form.

Goen Choi’s sculptural experiments thus expose the materials of the social systems and urban networks that lie hidden beneath the surface of the digital age. By focusing on mass-produced, readily recognizable consumer goods, she dismantles standardized systems of production and use, instead foregrounding the materiality of objects that usually go unnoticed.

Even as her sculptures shed their original forms and functions, they retain lingering traces of their commodity origins—residual contours and surfaces that drift through the urban landscape. In doing so, Choi's works invite us to re-sense and reimagine the invisible structures and systems that shape our everyday lives.

”Today, technology seems to be invisible and conceptualized. But technology still relies on a material foundation.” (Goen Choi, from the interview with Frieze Seoul, June 25, 2024)

Goen Choi received both her BFA and MFA in Sculpture from Seoul National University. She held her first solo exhibition, 《TORSO》, at the Kim Chong Yung Museum in Seoul in 2016, followed by 《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).

She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the 2024 Sculpture City Seoul 《The Strange Encounter》 (Songhyeon Green Plaza, Seoul, 2024), the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale (Changwon, 2024), 《off-site》 (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2023), and 《Sculpture Impulse》 (Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022).

Choi was an artist-in-residence at the SeMA Nanji Residency in 2019 and at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in 2017–18. In 2024, she was awarded the 2nd Frieze Seoul Artist Award.

References

• 비애티튜드, 미련해 보이는 미덕을 향해
• 프리즈, 최고은이 프리즈 서울 벽에 남긴 자국 – 윤율리, 2024.08.26 (Frieze, Choi Goen Is Punching Through Walls at Frieze Seoul – Yoon Yuli, 024.08.26)
• 국립아시아문화전당, 냉장고 환상 – 최고은 (National Asian Culture Center, Refrigerator Illusion – Goen Choi)
• P21, 자를수록 선명해지는, 최고은의 《비비드 컷츠》 – 박가희
• 기록저장소, [인터뷰] 대량생산된 사물로 만든 조각적 오브제: 최고은 인터뷰, 2017.02.08 
• 리포에틱, 최고은 인터뷰, 2022.06.07
• 프리즈, 프리즈 서울, 제 2회 '아티스트 어워드' 수상자로 최고은 작가 선정, 2024.06.25