ACC Future Class / Sun Choi: You and I, Butterflies

What form does a single breath leave behind?

You and I, Butterflies is a participatory media art project developed by ACC Future Class in collaboration with visual artist Sun Choi. The project builds on Butterflies, an ongoing work Choi began in 2014. In Butterflies, participants create a painting together by blowing paint across a canvas. As the paint spreads according to the force and direction of their breath, it leaves unpredictable traces that sometimes resemble butterflies with outstretched wings. Bringing together the breaths of people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, the painting becomes a shared space where individual traces meet and coexist.

In 2026, ACC Future Class posed a new question: What if people could bring their breaths together in a single artwork without having to share the same physical space? To explore this idea, the project extends Choi’s painting practice into the digital realm. When participants blow into their smartphones, the intensity and rhythm of their breath are captured as digital data and translated into a unique butterfly image. Just as no two breaths are alike, no two butterflies are the same. Free from the physical constraints of a shared canvas, participants can now contribute from anywhere, at any time. Each butterfly, generated through an individual act of breathing, connects with others created around the world, gradually forming a collective visual landscape. In December 2026, the butterflies created through online participation will be brought together in a moving-image work presented on the ACC Media Wall.

At first glance, Butterflies appears to be an abstract painting, but it is in fact composed of traces left by the breaths of many participants. When participants blow paint across the canvas, the force and direction of each breath cause the paint to spread and disperse, creating unpredictable forms. These traces sometimes resemble butterflies with their wings outstretched. Rather than being shaped by the artist’s brush, the painting emerges through breath—an act shared by all. Where traditions of abstract painting have often privileged the artist’s distinctive visual language and skilled gestures, Butterflies allows anyone to contribute to the artwork through their own breath. The breaths of anonymous individuals leave different traces on the canvas, yet each remains equally present as a trace of life. Moving away from conventional painting practices centered on the artist’s hands and eyes, the work shifts creative agency from the artist to the participants’ bodies, challenging established notions of authorship, artistic authority, and the act of painting itself. Ultimately, this leads to a question central to Choi’s practice: Can art be made without the use of hands or eyes?

Since 2014, Sun Choi has used Butterflies to explore how beauty might be found and shared through the simple act of being alive. The project began with the idea that even a single breath, fragile and almost imperceptible, might already be beautiful as an expression of life, regardless of gender, age, disability, religion, or nationality. Through the accumulation of individual breaths, Choi sought to create a painting that could hold the presence of many different lives. At the same time, Butterflies brings together the breaths of people from diverse backgrounds on a single canvas. Each breath leaves a unique trace, yet these traces meet and coexist without erasing one another. Breath becomes both an expression of individual difference and a universal sign of life—a way people acknowledge one another’s presence and form connections.

Sun Choi examines the contradictions inherent in binary ways of understanding art and its value. His work questions established distinctions between beauty and ugliness, while challenging fixed assumptions about painting and artistic practice more broadly. Working across painting and installation, Choi employs unconventional materials to give material form to questions arising from everyday life and contemporary society. Grounded in a critical engagement with contemporary art and everyday life, Choi reflects on “today, here, and us,” examining the shifting relationship between art and lived experience.

Open participation (accessible via mobile devices): sunchoi-butterflies.art