I love you, Choi Sori.
Kim Jong-geun (Art critic)

I'm going to say Choi Sori now. But how can we define him? I cannot define him. It's not necessarily because he's a musician who makes sounds. This is because all of his works are born through his magical music. Once those who saw his performance shuddered across the air and shouted "I love you Choi Sori!" while praying for him to stand in front of us for a long time, shaking his performance and saying, "I love you Choi Sori!"
Starting as a drummer for a rock group called Baekdu Mountain, he appeared with art works while working as a musician. After a solo exhibition at Topo House a long time ago, he seemed silent for a while. Then, Choi Sori, a soloist of percussion instruments, suddenly returned. It is also an unprecedented workload that fills the entire four floors of the Geumbo-seong Art Center with hundreds of works. While painting like that, he asked not to call himself a painter until the end.


He's an artist of natural sounders. This is because Choi Sori's tapping, the art of echo, is a nail that calls for the soul, a longing for sound, and an infinite constructor of sound. Everyone who has heard his music at least once always claims to enter the 'state of seeing the sound' and 'the state of seeing the sound'. His percussion art is therefore strange, unfamiliar, and sometimes touching for us. Now we ask questions in front of hundreds of works that have been released by his beatings. What kind of art are these? How much is art worth? Also, what is the relationship between music and art?
Above all, his work was percussion, born on an iron plate or on a styrofoam board on paper. And these are the echoes and traces of sound created by tapping rather than being drawn. That's why it's red. The feast of blue, yellow, and other mixed colors is a kind of performance and is included in the performance art. And on top of that, he leaves it there, he colors it, he scratches it. Sometimes it's like a rough step, sometimes holily quiet, and passionate like a violent cry.
A very clear fact of all these movements is that they start with sound and are sequentially made by pure artistic gestures. These acts will also be controversial, as if Marcel Duchamp had placed the toilet bowl in the exhibition hall. However, such an issue is already a classic in modern art history and is exactly 100 years old. So the trajectory that he's beaten, photographed, and drawn out is artistic enough as a product of action.
 
Earlier, the avant-garde artist Picavia would have named music "art" and produced sophisticated works. The point of contact between music and art is also found in the new wave of avant-garde, or Fluxus, which destroys the boundaries of art after Marcel Duchamp in Baek Nam-jun's video.
Like video art, which is the crystallization of a new encounter between music and art, Choi Sori created a new art form in which sound becomes art. In comparison, the fact that Mondrian impressed the jazz he saw in Manhattan, New York, and painted a series of "boosting" is no longer new in art. What is clear is that rhythm and melody are potions that move a person's heartstrings. So, Choi Sori's artistic start is that it reveals all the actions and processes of music turning into abstract art.It is both ideological and revolutionary.
"Every object in the world has its own unique sound. I will put those sounds in my heart and play and constantly explore new sounds through the communion of life. This album is the sounds I've seen, heard, and worked on over the years while feeling the living vitality and infinite power through contact with many objects. Choi's autobiographical confession clearly shows how far his voice spreads.
Like he plays drums on music, every act of hitting the iron plate to the rhythm is an avant-garde form of creative action that completely dismantles the expression form of art. The act of imprinting dynamic elements on the iron plate, like the Fluxus movement, is independent as if presenting the past, present, and future art at once while putting the formative beauty of traditional aesthetics at the forefront. In other words, it is interpreted that Choi So-ri succeeded in building the encounter between music and art, which was only a slogan, in a realistic three-dimensional space while expressing the ideological world discussed in the two-dimensional.
Perhaps, as Joseph Boyce argued, "The auditory elements and the sculptural properties of sound in art are always central to me," sound is evaluated as such a working attitude that contributes to actually transcending it in the production of the work.
The painting of Choi Sori's image raises important questions for us, as Pierre Schaeffer defines it as "all sounds are images of events." I ask if this can be a picture, too. Instead of answering this question, I would like to quote an interview with video artist Paik Nam-joon. He said, "I solved this problem with tactile drawings. It started in 1966 and was only slow to do so three years later. Visual scores are drawn in ink. I closed my eyes and started drawing sound pictures, looking at nothing, just touching it. It is completed when I tear it up and the work disappears. On the surface of the paper, there remains a blank sheet the size of a human body, where the visions unfold endlessly and show space and sound. I hear my recorded footsteps on a monumental painting." Yes. Choi Sori's work is very similar to Paik Nam-jun's agony, expression, and creativity.

Just as letters are expressions of language, language is also images. And the language is fundamental. Music also describes something. What remains is whether Choi So-ri's harmony in painting is taking place on the screen. However, Choi So-ri believes that in an ecstatic form of performance art, it is important in itself, and that everyone is valuable and exists. Therefore, both visual and acoustic interactions were active, resulting in hundreds of works of various shapes and colors. So his works were born almost like improvised symphonies. Some works are based on such grounds if they find an absolutely unpredictable moment of emotion on the canvas.

Choi So-ri's sound now has a characteristic that can be seen with the eyes rather than being able to hear it. Just as visual left a space of freedom and reason, Choi Sori secured freedom by turning to traditional Korean traditional music to overcome the limitations that drums can express. And it is judged that it has shifted to art to transcend or surpass the world of sound.
The limit of the sound a drum can make, the passion to make a sound that is visible by grasping the topic of echo and sound. That is the last artistic spirit that Choi Sori reached.

Choi Sori's relaxation and generosity in building a hut in the mountain and exploring sound like water, and saying, "I have been suffering from noise-induced hearing loss for years, but if I completely lose my hearing, I'll be able to hear my imagination better." I like it very much. Therefore, I had to visit the studio near Seoul three times to write this article. This is because of the surprise of his style of producing works from time to time and working overnight for several days. I finish writing about him by replaying his performance and sound again.
In the face of these enormous works of his, I finally discovered that Assori could be such an excellent language of art. Likewise, just as Italian painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana created the concept of space and created a unique plane by cutting and tearing the canvas, Choi So-ri will be recorded as a rare artist who created art with sound.