[SEOUL] Read My Lips: Sohyun Ban, Stella Sujin, Woojung Koh

CHOI&CHOI Gallery is pleased to present Read My Lips, a three-person exhibition featuring works by Woojung Koh, Sohyun Ban, and Stella Sujin, on view from 19 May through 10 June, 2026.

The exhibition examines how unstable emotions and conflicts embedded within human relationships emerge through distinct visual languages. Through their respective practices, the artists explore human emotions and sensory experiences alongside structures of perception and relationships embedded within contemporary existence, visualizing how intangible experiences of oppression, conflict, anxiety, and survival accumulate, mutate, and take shape within the individual psyche.

The title Read My Lips suggests more than simply “hear my words.” It points toward bodily gestures through which emotions, sincerity, and intentions concealed behind language are communicated physically. In particular, the lips – soft, vulnerable, sensual, and deeply associated with femininity – function as a symbolic device throughout the exhibition, evoking the sense of corporeality and agency that runs through the practices of all three artists.

Sohyun Ban(b. 1985) records moments in which emotional instability becomes imprinted onto the surface through spontaneous painterly gestures driven by anxiety and intuition. Standing before the canvas with the intention of depicting a specific image, contradiction and unease manifest physically through trembling hands. While aesthetic compositions and dreamlike palettes suggest that the artist’s intention has not entirely disappeared, psychological tensions arising throughout the process dismantle once-clear landscapes and forms, constructing fluid and abstract pictorial fields instead. The traces of conflict left upon the surface remain exposed rather than concealed, reading like a sensory diary conveyed directly through the artist’s body.

Through the materiality of clay, Woojung Koh(b. 1984) explores continuously shifting notions of the self and the other, delving into fluid relationships and states of being. The artist began working with clay as a way of investigating her own identity and sensations shaped by changing environments, places of residence, and human relationships encountered throughout life. Beginning as a single mass, then divided, combined, hardened, broken, and reassembled, the ceramic process becomes both metaphorical and autobiographical. Repeated and distorted forms of faces and bodies reveal identities constantly colliding and being reconstructed between the self, others, and the collective. States of selfhood formed through perpetual conflict and transformation are edited through the artist’s gaze, contextualized through the artist’s language, and shaped into form through the artist’s hands.

Based in Paris, Stella Sujin(b. 1983) constructs narrative worlds that address social oppression and inner psychological conflict through visual languages historically associated with femininity. The recurring figure of the “girl,” which has appeared throughout the artist’s practice since its early stages, references historical narratives of violence and oppression such as the witch trials, taking shape within ambiguous spaces where reality, mythology, and religious narratives intersect. Motifs of humanity, society, nature, and survival coexist within friction and anxiety, forming layered narratives throughout her work. Combining symbolic imagery – Including flowers, female genitalia, and crimson lips – with the fluid materiality of watercolor, the artist creates scenes in which beauty and unease, desire and threat coexist.