in cooperation with KIF – Kunst im Fenster (René Block)

An exhibition in two parts:
Part 1: 27.6-30.7.2025
Part 2: 1.8-31.8.2025 (opening 31 July)

The Process of Becoming
Jenifer Higgie

Sunah Choi shows me around her studio. I’m in London, she’s in Berlin: we’re linked by the small glowing rectangle of her phone. She zooms in on a group of geometric wooden sculptures – which she calls ‘maquettes’ – she’s in the midst of making.

Variously sized, configured and painted in a mix of bright, matte, primary and secondary colours, the sculptures are replete with references to art, design and architecture: from shelves, containers and windows, to panel paintings, triptychs and floorplans. The hinges on the edge of the sculptures allows them to open and close, which visitors are invited to do. The sculptures are clearly restless things, at once playful and serious, calling to mind Marcel Duchamp’s famous observation that whoever is looking at the work of art completes it.

Whilst ostensibly abstract, Choi’s work makes clear that abstraction is a complicated concept: colours, lines and shapes will always, somehow, allude to something beyond themselves. The sky is seen through the rectangle of a window; the shelf is a straight line, a support and a showcase. As Rosalind Krauss observed: the grid is not simply the arrangement of lines, it ‘functions to declare the modernity of modern art’. (1)

The word ‘maquette’ traditionally refers to a small-scale model, a rough draft of a sculpture or architectural design, which is used to visualize and test ideas, before the full-scale work is created. It’s derived from the Italian word, macchietta, meaning ‘sketch’. It occurs to me that what Choi is showing me is something of a riddle: sculptures that will, once displayed, be considered final, but which are, in fact, the embodiment of an idea in the process of becoming.

Choi mentions the Korean still life tradition of chaekgeori, which translates loosely as ‘books and things’ and flourished from the late 18th century to the first half of the 20th. Multiple versions of the paintings exist, each of which highlights a different configuration of variously coloured bookshelves. Choi says: ‘How you collect, sort, store and organize things says a lot about you. That’s why I found the shelf to be an exciting object that can be used to connect and address many things.’(2) The artist has also been inspired by the Italian studiolo – a small space set aside for study – which flourished in the 15th century. She says she likes to create imaginary connections between the Korean and the Italian traditions. Modernism, in Choi’s hands, clearly emerged from rich, cross-cultural traditions.

Describing herself as both a ‘substance and a filter’, Choi says she is ‘interested in certain historical spaces that have carried ideas’. Born and raised in Korea, she talks about herself as a ‘large container into which many influences have flowed from all directions and are flowing out again. Some have settled at the bottom. Others float on the surface. Still others are so well mixed with others that I no longer know where they come from.’

In many ways Choi’s sculptures are an enigmatic meditation on the idea of boundaries and borders – in other words, of the potential of, and resistance to, containment. Their suggestion of floor plans prompts a particular set of questions: who is allowed to enter this space? Who has access? Who is encouraged to stay? What does shelter imply? The possibilities are endless.

(1) Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, Mass. and London 1985, p.1.

(2) Unless otherwise mentioned, all quotes from Jennifer Higgie’s interviews with, and notes from, Sunah Choi, June 2025.

#3 Under the Skin: Sunah Choi

Under the Skin is a recurring interview format, where GROTTO gallery manager Maria Helena Konttinen Nerhus sits down with the artist of our current exhibition to learn more about the whys and the hows.

Maria Helena Konttinen Nerhus: Could you describe, in your own words, your practice?

Sunah Choi: My artistic practice revolves around the tension between seemingly contradictory ideas, forms, and materials. Observations and associations drawn from everyday life and visual culture condense into dialogical compositions that play with antitheses and unsettling the familiar and opening it up to question. My artistic language often draws on Western modernism — while simultaneously calling its claim to universality into question through global historical references. Objects, sculptures, photographs and installations are for me less finished works than moments within an ongoing process that interrogates patterns of perception and explores the sculptural potential of forms and ideas. The spatial context — often site-specific — is not a neutral backdrop, but an essential part of the work's meaning. My most recent works move confidently between image, sculpture, architecture, and interior space.

M.H.K.N.: How do you look at shelves and functional objects in the home?

Sunah Choi: I look at shelves and functional objects with the same curiosity I bring to any sculptural form — attentively, and with the sense that more is being said than what is immediately visible. A shelf is never just a shelf. It is a line, a support, a stage — a structure that organizes, displays, and reveals. The way things are collected, sorted, and stored says something about the person who arranged them: about hierarchies of value, about what we choose to show and what we prefer to keep hidden. What fascinates me above all is the tension between function and form, between the utilitarian and the poetic. Everyday objects are never entirely neutral for me — they accumulate meaning through use, through context, through the cultural traditions they belong to. The Korean tradition of Chaekgeori painting has taught me that the way one organizes and displays objects is itself a form of language. A shelf can speak about knowledge, about longing, about identity. In my work, I try to preserve this complexity — to create objects that feel familiar and yet remain open, that invite you to project your own thoughts into the empty spaces they leave behind.

M.H.K.N.: Some of your work invites the viewer to touch and move them, where did this direct interaction derived from?

Sunah Choi: All of these works are „maquettes" that can be read as models for spaces. Opened up and mounted on the wall, they become ambiguous — oscillating between image, object, and sculpture. They exist in various configurations. Like small triptychs, they feature additional panels that are laterally movable thanks to multiple angle hinges. Moving freely between three-dimensional object and unfolded spatial network, they develop a poetry of space entirely their own. The invitation to touch and move these works is not an afterthought, but inscribed into their structure from the very beginning. The angle hinges, the movable side panels, the possibility of opening and closing the object — all of this is formally conceived, not decorative. It also came naturally from my ongoing engagement with objects that exist at the boundary between sculpture and everyday use. Functional things invite touch by their very nature — we open doors, fold back shutters, move things without thinking. I wanted to translate that ease and naturalness into the work itself. In the „maquettes“, the mobility is formally determined by the hinges — but how and where someone moves the panels remains open.

M.H.K.N.: In some of your work you reference churches, for example Beichtstuhl (2025) in Maquette Part 2, and Kathedrale (2025) in Maquette Part 1. How did you begin working with church spaces?

Sunah Choi: It began very concretely — with an exhibition at the Museum Nikolaikirche in Berlin in 2018, a deconsecrated medieval church that had been converted into an exhibition space. There I was confronted with the particular light conditions at the base of the church tower. The lighting situation was so challenging that it forced me to think differently. I developed an installation with alternating coloured slide projections, in front of which I placed sculptures made of steel mesh, so that shadows created additional layers of drawing. The space itself became the material. What interests me about the church is less the religious in the narrow sense, but rather the church as a type of space and as an idea — as a place that has been charged, throughout Western history, with a dense layer of symbolism and ideology.
Kathedrale (Cathedral) is a wall-mounted wooden object whose overall form immediately recalls the floor plan of a cathedral: a tall, narrow element with a rounded upper edge forms the nave, while two lateral, oval wings suggest the transept. Below, the form continues in a shorter rectangular element — like a choir or altar space. The phallic connotation of this floor plan is difficult to overlook and forms the conceptual core of the work. The surfaces are hand-painted with a grid in various shades of pink, red, and lilac. The warm, body-like colours further intensify the organic, corporeal quality of the object. Through this layering of cathedral floor plan and phallic form, the work casts a subtle but determined critical eye on masculine power structures that have manifested themselves over centuries in architecture and institution — making visible what has always already been inscribed in the supposedly neutral language of architecture.
Beichtstuhl (Confessional) takes the form of a small wall-mounted cabinet made of dark-stained wood. It has two doors, each fitted with a glass panel set into the frame. The glass panels are covered with an even grid whose individual fields have been painted in various shades of blue and green. The interplay of colours within the grid creates an almost mosaic-like surface. The doors can be opened, revealing the interior of the cabinet. What was previously a compact, self-contained form unfolds into something more expansive and open — like the pages of an open book or the wings of a diptych. The contrast between the dense, hand-painted surface of the glass and the quiet emptiness within creates a sense of depth and intimacy — as though the cabinet holds not objects, but light and colour itself. In this way, the work shifts from furniture to sculpture, from container to composition. Through the title Beichtstuhl (Confessional), the object transforms into a miniature model of a space. The coloured light that falls through the glass panels refers to the tradition of stained church windows. The boundary between everyday object and work of art dissolves — and in the mind of the viewer, a quiet shift in dimensions takes place.

M.H.K.N.: I find your understanding of colour and colour combinations striking. Could you share a little about your relationship to colour and paint?

Sunah Choi: My relationship to colour is closely bound up with my engagement with light and transparency. When I paint a glass panel, it is not only the surface that changes — the light falling through it changes too, as does the shadow it casts and the atmosphere of the entire space. Colour, in this sense, can never be considered in isolation, but always in relation to the material, the space, and the light in which it appears. What fascinates me is the question of what colour does to a material: how it makes glass luminous from within, how it weighs down wood or lends it an unexpected lightness, how it plays with the grain of the wood and in doing so brings something new into being, how it mediates between the concrete and the abstract. For me, painting is in this sense always also a sculptural gesture.

M.H.K.N.: I wonder if you could tell me how you understand your art practice as a self-expanding universe? I mean the way methods and themes take your focus for a time, then shift aside, never disappearing, only waiting until you return to them from another angle. For example, your work Wartezimmer für weisse Bohnen (2025), exhibited under Maquette Part 2 at GROTTO, invites reflection on the concept of the waiting room. Earlier you presented a related series – similar in dimensions, though in other materials – under another title Bohnen Gleise I-IV (2015). In those works, the waiting room was not yet central; another aspect of investigation held your attention.

Sunah Choi: Yes, that is a very apt description. My practice truly feels like a self-expanding universe — one that never really discards anything, but holds ideas, methods, materials, and already existing works in a kind of suspension, ready to be reactivated from a different angle or in a new context. A theme or a material might occupy my attention intensely for a period — the grid, for instance, or the relationship between glass and light, or the idea of the shelf as a cultural form — and then recede, only to resurface later in an unexpected configuration. The same applies to the works themselves. Unrealised ideas, unfinished objects, already exhibited works — they remain in the studio or in the sketchbook, waiting to be retrieved. By taking something away or adding something, by transferring them into a new spatial or conceptual context, they acquire new meaning. The reuse of my own works is for me an artistic strategy — a way of continuing to think.
I believe this is why the idea of the maquette resonates so deeply with my practice. A maquette is never finished — it is always a model for something else, a proposition rather than a conclusion. In the same way, I think of each exhibition and each object as a temporary crystallisation of an ongoing process. The work does not resolve itself into a final statement. It opens onto the next question — and so the universe keeps expanding, not because I plan it that way, but because thinking and making simply work like this: one thing always leads to another.

Text by Jennifer Higgie
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→ Press

Multicoloured rooms with hinged walls by Dominic Eichler, 30 July 2025
DIE ZEIT – Und was machst du am Wochenende? / Gabi Dziuba (Podcast)

The postcard (1) is available online via (1)

Related event: Maquette Part 1 Launch & Talk (Spector Books)