Checksy Choi is a contemporary artist who enacts Eotieum through Checkered Expressionism, exploring how relation persists within fracture.

Grounded in a Korean sensibility of relation, her practice explores how relation persists without full alignment—where misalignment is not rupture, but a structure of connection.

Through Checkered Expressionism, she articulates this idea through works built with layered Hanji (traditional Korean paper) on canvas, alongside a large-scale installation. Her compositions deliberately resist resolution, treating structure not as containment but as a condition that allows relation to remain in motion.

Eotieum describes a state in which disparate elements and temporal layers continue to connect through misalignment. What fails to fully align does not create rupture; rather, it becomes the very structure that generates breath, continuity, and new relational possibilities. In this sense, misalignment is not a deviation from relation, but the condition that redefines how relation comes into being.

Emerging from the condition of a divided Korea, Choi’s understanding of relation is grounded in a structure in which separation and proximity coexist without resolution. This lived condition situates Eotieum not as a subject, but as a foundational structure.

Choi’s practice is shaped by the afterlives of the Korean War and this condition of division. Her grandmother’s defection from North Korea and her grandfather’s experience as a Korean War veteran created an environment in which fracture and silence were transmitted across generations. Rather than being directly depicted, these inherited divisions and silences are translated into a visual system that carries accumulated tension forward without resolution, allowing relation to continue through it. 

Her practice unfolds within layered fields where rupture and connection operate simultaneously. Each intersection holds longing, distance, and misalignment, remaining in motion rather than fixed. Eotieum functions not as representation but as a methodology: a way of understanding how what cannot fully align continues to exist and deepen. It proposes that continuity does not depend on coherence, and that relation may be strengthened through misalignment. 

Her work has been recognized internationally, including selection for HUG: 100 Artists to Watch, with a jury including Madeleine Pierpont of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Sebastian Sanchez of Christie’s, and Jiayin Chen of Artnet. Her work is featured in a publication held by the Royal Library, Copenhagen. Additional honors include a UNV Certificate of Honor and designation as a Hug Visionary Artist.