Checksy Choi's Eotieum: A Hanji Fishing Boat Docks Inside a Seoul Cold War Bunker That Never Lets Anyone Land

This bunker was originally built to stop tanks. Thick concrete, sealed shut, impact-resistant—Seoul's Cold War-era anti-tank bunker, the Peace Culture Bunker, now holds the memory of a fishing boat, courtesy of artist Checksy Choi. Her exhibition Eotieum: The Ply of Longing occupies two chambers of the bunker plus the connecting corridor, taking as its starting point the fishing boat her grandmother boarded to flee North Korea during the Korean War. Rather than reconstructing the boat itself, Choi breaks it down into a concept she calls "Eotieum" (엇이음): dislocation isn't a failure of connection, but the very condition under which relationships continue to exist. The project began shortly after her grandmother's passing—she had originally hoped to see the finished exhibition with her own eyes.

In the first chamber, Eotieum Vessel—430cm long, 220cm wide, 110cm tall—anchors the entire show. A welded steel frame is covered in thousands of hand-torn hanji paper fragments, rearranged into "Gyeokja" (격자), a lattice vocabulary Choi developed from traditional Korean wooden lattice windows. The form is deliberately porous, letting light, air, humidity, and visitors' movement pass through its surface, casting ever-shifting shadows across the walls and floor as conditions change—less a fixed sculpture than a container that breathes.

A Boat in the Corridor, an Embrace Behind the Fence

In the connecting corridor, You May Pull the Vessel features a small hanji-paper boat tethered by hemp rope. Before the opening, Choi herself pulled the boat through this corridor; afterward, visitors take over the same gesture. The boat leaves no permanent trace, but the act itself continues to be passed on through sound, memory, and repetition.

The second chamber's Net Hug delivers the show's most direct blow: a steel mesh supports reassembled hanji-paper footprints while doubling as a literal barrier. Visitors standing on either side can reach through the gaps in the grid to embrace one another, but can never actually cross to the other side. Bodies stay separated, yet shadows pass over the barrier, briefly overlapping on the surfaces around them. Over time, repeated footsteps gradually crease, wear down, and tear the hanji footprints—letting the installation itself record the accumulated traces of visitors' presence.

The exhibition extends into two flat works as well. Longing Extends North (hanji, acrylic, thread on linen, 162.2×130.3cm) shows a hanji boat repeatedly dragged across an acrylic-painted surface, its trail fixed into layers of pigment, over which hundreds of hand-torn hanji fragments form two hands reaching toward each other without ever touching. Still (hanji and acrylic on linen, 162.2×112.1cm) continues the same material language. In both works, the porous hanji is deliberately left not fully sealed into the acrylic surface, keeping a loose, unresolved relationship between the still image beneath and the breathing paper above.

From welded steel to hand-torn hanji, Choi never intended to "repair" or fully reconstruct her grandmother's boat. She lets separation, incompleteness, and dislocation remain exactly where they are—continuing to exist as a form of connection. That, ultimately, is what Eotieum: The Ply of Longing is trying to hold onto. The exhibition runs in 2026 at Seoul's Peace Culture Bunker; exact dates and ticketing information were not provided in the source material.