K-ART FOCUS For Choi Sung-im, bread ties become golden blanket

At Sunhyewon, the secluded traditional Korean house-turned-art space in Seoul’s Samcheong-dong, a glittering carpet unfurls across the lobby. Looking closer, however, Choi Sung-im’s “Golden Blanket” (2026) reveals itself to be handwoven from thousands of the gold wire ties used to seal bags of sliced bread.

The 6.2-by-4.8-meter installation, which took more than a month to make by hand, anchors PODO Museum’s “A Note From Trembling Things.”

“For me, a blanket is not simply a household item,” Choi said during a press preview during Frieze Seoul Art Week. "When I open my eyes in the morning, it is the first landscape that I see and it touches my body — a world larger than my body.” She wanted to place it at a threshold, she said, such as wooden floor of "hanok" traditional Korean house, where interior and exterior meet.

The exhibition explores the ways people inhabit the world together, featuring works by Choi, Lebanese-British artist Mona Hatoum and Korean artist Kim Yun-soo.

“Every being changes, and perhaps it is because we change that we are vulnerable,” Choi said.

Working with 'fragile materials'

Choi mainly works with what she calls "fragile materials," such as onion sacks, plastic balls from children’s ball pits and other industrial items that are light, inexpensive and easily discarded.

Through cutting, tying, weaving and accumulating, the materials grow into larger forms.

Working with ordinary objects and making installations, however, was not her first calling.

Born in 1977, she was trained in Western-style painting at Ewha Womans University and pursued a career using those techniques.

Later, as a mother of four children, her responsibilities and the environment in which she found herself led her to reconsider her choices.

“White canvases felt too far from my day, too far from places where my time was flowing,” she recalled during a recent interview with The Korea Times. “I wanted the kimchi soup that spilled and the stains of life to become not stains but beautiful patterns.”

She began working with what was close at hand. Her domestic environment did not become a subject to illustrate but the condition that changed her artistic language.

“I had no desire to reproduce everyday life. I wanted to turn it over — to make familiar things strange, almost uncanny,” she said.

Fragile materials offered a means of thinking and enduring by using them to create large-scale installations.

Choi held her first solo exhibition in 2012 at the age of 35, when she was already raising her four children.

“I was kind of an artist on vacation,” she said of the years before her first exhibition. “I was doing something else at home. I was thinking a great deal about what it means to be an artist: ‘Can I be an artist only when I work on something? Or when presenting something to the world?’”

Simplicity

Simplicity is a deliberate choice that defines her work, the artist said.

“There is no special technique in my work,” she declared in the modest studio where she handwove "Golden Blanket" — now featured in one of Seoul’s most sought-after art exhibitions.

“It is not about extraordinary craftsmanship or highly elaborate embroidery. It is a very simple back-and-forth action, connecting an end to a beginning.”

What matters most, she added, is a “shift in thought.”

Choi’s early installations loomed large, not to create spectacle but because small, vulnerable things need to gather together in order to survive.

“Like ivy growing over a wall or barnacles attaching themselves to a rock, my work resembles the way small and fragile beings find a place in the world and endure,” she said.

Career and motherhood

Choi was reluctant to speak publicly about being a mother until recently, concerned that her work would be reduced to a particular framing around family.

“I worried that people would stop at one sentence: the artist who made bread-tie work because she raised children at home,” she said. “But I also began to feel that without explaining my situation, people might not understand why I spoke so persistently about inside and outside.”

Her eldest daughter, Kim Seo-young, wrote the introduction to her mother’s artistic brochure. In it, she wrote that her mother moves between three worlds: "her family, her identity and her vision.”

"However, she has also been part of one world — an intricately intertwined, not segregated world," according to the daughter in the introduction. “She is my mom. She is a woman. She is an artist."

In 2014, the family published a collection of essays, “Four Pairs of Eyes,” in which Choi and her children wrote about what it meant to be both a mother and an artist.

They described how Choi's motherhood and art found their places at the kitchen table, where the family ate, studied, read and drew together. As soon as the children went to bed, she returned to the same table to cut, stitch, draw or weave for an upcoming exhibition.

For Choi and her children, art was never confined to a distant studio. It was “a way of living together.”

"My mom was an artist who fell in love with art long before she became a mother. She was not planning to give it up even amidst the responsibilities of raising not one, two, but four children," Choi's daughter Ji-heon wrote in the book. "The commitment and devotion she shows to art is more than anyone can imagine, something that only those close would fully comprehend."

Exhibitions sometimes feel ephemeral — painstakingly built and then swept away when an installation ends. Choi sees that impermanence as part of installation art’s “theatrical charm” in that a work exists fully only once, in a particular place and moment.

Watching people tend their gardens outside her Suwon studio, however, has changed how she thinks about what remains. Each year, they turn the soil, clear the plants and prepare the ground anew. The season’s labor is not erased; it stays in the body as knowledge.

“For me, the same is true of art,” Choi said. “An ongoing practice of making, unmaking and beginning again.”