In January 2026, four months after his passing, the work of Choi Byung-so feels more urgent and resonant than ever. 

Since the late twentieth century, his practice has persistently interrogated the media’s relentless accumulation of information—the incessant torrent of news, advertising, and speech that overwhelms and exhausts contemporary life. 

Choi recognized that such instrumental uses of language estrange us from meaning itself, distancing us from what enables us to live, to think, and to remain conscious of our own existence. 

CHOI Byung-so Untitled 0241029, 2024 ballpoint pen on paper 120 × 80 × 1 cm | 47 1/4 × 31 1/2 × 0 3/8 inches Framed : 136.3 × 98 × 4.5 cm | 53 11/16 × 38 9/16 × 1 3/4 inches Unique

Against this noise, he proposed a dense and silent presence.

Working first through visual means and then through conceptual inquiry, Choi Byung-so moved decisively beyond questions of aesthetics. 

His work adopts a critical position, enacting a radical reversal of the invasion of messages and ideologies that saturate everyday life. 

His resistance to the alienating manipulation produced by the mass proliferation of rhetoric and images constitutes a refusal of the tyranny of dysfunctionality.

 In 2026, this stance—an opposition to all that is artificial and deceptive—feels more necessary than ever, as strategies of power increasingly threaten to turn individuals and societies into distorted puppets, overwhelmed by excess and stripped of the capacity for understanding.

Choi Byung-so counters this inverted spectacle by offering a negation of its logic, opening instead onto a different space—one he constructs through his work as an artist and painter. 

Drawing is his tool of resistance.

 Entry into this space of liberation occurs through acts of obliteration: endless lines of ballpoint pen that cover and eclipse accumulated phrases.

 He does not erase words completely; rather, he crosses them out, transforming them into another form of writing. 

With rigor, and at times with quiet humor, he leaves behind fragments such as magazine titles—TIME, LIFE—condensed into their most clichéd media forms and reframed as fundamental philosophical questions.

It is precisely this life, this lived time, that Choi Byung-so allows us to rediscover. 

Through a slow and patient process of ink drawing, he stains, scores, and tears paper, producing gestures, rhythms, and surfaces that invite us to reclaim ourselves. 

CHOI Byung-so Untitled 0230110, 2023 ballpoint pen and pencil on newspaper 54.5 × 80 × 1 cm | 21 7/16 × 31 1/2 × 0 3/8 inches Framed : 71 × 96 × 4.2 cm | 27 15/16 × 37 13/16 × 1 5/8 inches Unique

The spaces generated by his practice—at once paintings, sculptures, and installations—become paths and territories for the recovery of the self, experienced through perception, the body, and light.

These paths can emerge from almost nothing: an ordinary object, a microcosm—a cigarette pack, a sheet of newspaper. 

Or they can expand into a macrocosm, a constellation of gathered papers forming a kind of universe.

They arise from a deeply physical and mental engagement. 

A tear becomes a passage, moving through destruction, traces, and ruins—an act of creative archaeology that yields a striking beauty.

 It is the beauty of furrowed surfaces and clustered incisions, leading into a darkness threaded with flashes of light and vibrant energy.

In this experience, the strategies of grammar and the immediacy of vocabulary fall away. 

What remains is the encounter with a silence “of another measure of time”—a time that escapes social contingency and opens onto an intense, pared-down experience of boundlessness.

Choi Byung-so consistently sought to transform the material conditions of his chosen medium through a performative process of erasing printed text on newspapers with ballpoint pens and pencils, guided by a methodology entirely his own. 

By actively incorporating everyday materials—newspapers, pens, and pencils—into his practice, he demonstrated a spirit of experimentation that was already evident in his earliest works. 

Through repetitive, action-based gestures on the surface, materials drawn directly from daily life are stripped of their original functions and reconstituted with entirely new material and conceptual identities.

When Choi Byung-so began working with newspapers in the 1970s, avant-garde movements around the world were rejecting conservative forms and values in favor of radical experimentation, while, at the same time, media control and the suppression of expression were widespread in society.

CHOI Byung-so Untitled 0240130, 2024 ballpoint pen and pencil on newspaper 120 × 80 × 1 cm | 47 1/4 × 31 1/2 × 0 3/8 inches Framed : 135.5 × 99.5 × 4.5 cm | 53 3/8 × 39 3/16 × 1 3/4 inches

 As a young artist in his early thirties living within this climate, newspapers were the most immediate and accessible form of mass media. 

Yet it was precisely his frustration with the media’s lack of autonomy and its role within systems of control that led him to take up the ballpoint pen—not to write, but to erase.