Soojin Choi: A Distance For All, But A Distance For No One

What's your relationship to combat sports? Is that a lifelong love or is it more recent?

You know, I saw UFC on TV as a kid and was immediately like, what is this? This is fascinating, exciting. I got more into watching MMA in the past 10 years. I had a friend who was already into it and told me some of the fighters’ backstories, and then I really fell in love and started watching all the fights and obsessing over my favorite fighters and their stories and the human drama of it. Then in the past couple of years, I met Adam through my friend Alice, and he took us to indie wrestling shows. And I hadn't grown up watching professional wrestling. I'd been tangentially aware of it, but had never seen it. My first experience at these live independent shows was so exciting. I’ve gone to two WrestleManias now. The [most recent] WrestleMania itself was a little disappointing, but the independent events around [WrestleMania weekend] were awesome. There are wrestlers from all over the world, like [Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling] and the luchadors. I've just been amazed that there's this thriving subculture that supports all these independent artists.

You teed up my next question— who's your favorite MMA fighter right now and why?

My favorite MMA fighter is one I’ve got conveniently on my shirt today! Islam Makchaev, probably the best in the world. He's just a horse girl like me, and a real silly goose. I love his sense of humor. I also love Khabib [Nurmagomedov], and I love the crazy energy that comes out of Dagestan. Obviously, they’re really good guys, too— it's been really fun to watch their careers. I’ve gone to a couple of [Makhachev’s] fights, and he’s both incredibly dominant and also silly. It’s really funny, there are these ridiculous and silly people who are also the most dangerous fighters in the world.

There are a lot of different perspectives on the artistic value of both MMA and wrestling. Some say it's performance art on par with ballet. Others point towards the pure athleticism required for the sport. Others pigeonhole it as light entertainment. What's your perspective? What do you see in your subject, and how do you link it to visual arts?

I think they are absolutely visual artists. They're up there with (to me) the purest form of art. It's like a celebration of human ideals, right? Human strength, human resilience. You know, I used to be a little bit ashamed. I had these liberal ideas imposed on me, ideas of violence as an inherently bad thing. But there's actually a time for everything, and this is consensual violence with boundaries. It’s for its own sake, and I think it's really beautiful— it inspires me to be more disciplined. These are the most disciplined people in the world, but they're not being appropriately taken care of and compensated, you know? There are complexities to engaging with it as a viewer, like everything under capitalism. But mixed martial artists are absolutely artists, and I really appreciate the work that they do.

So much of the MMA and wrestling space is occupied, if not monopolized, by [UFC and WWE parent company] TKO. There's been a larger discussion about them marginalizing the actual fighters, about fighter pay and exploitative contracts, like you just mentioned. They've been accused of trying to make the fighters replaceable, with the UFC brand serving as a star of the show. It sounded like an individual competitor. Would you say your art and its focal points are in conversation with that?

Absolutely. I mean, I couldn't even bring myself to draw the UFC logo in my drawings. That's why they say FUC, all over those things.

I noticed that!

Yeah, I was like, fuck them. Fuck Dana [White, CEO of UFC]. I don't even want to indirectly give any support to that organization, even though I love the fighters that are forced to work under those conditions. It's complicated. I would love to see some more competition, some better working conditions, better protection for fighters. They don't even have healthcare, you know— it's a really disgusting situation. It's complicated, but I love the sport.

How do you find these very specific moments in a fight to depict?

These are moments that are absolutely burned in my brain from when they happened— I think about these moments all the time. They were transcendent and unforgettable. So, I have lots of screenshots! I have saved images, files, and folders of these. I'd love to get up closer and be able to take my own. I had really good seats at this last fight on Saturday in New Jersey, so we might do some drawings from my own photos of that fight. Joshua Van and [Tatsuro] Taira, that was really incredible. 

The name of this exhibition is bloodlust. I'd argue that when depicting itself, MMA privileges moments of triumph. Images of champions holding up the belt, or near instant knockouts. Your work seems to gravitate more towards these moments of brutality and struggle. Is that intentional?

Yeah, maybe. It feels like moments of abandon. Like when Luke Rockhold was losing his last fight in the UFC, and then in the last 10 seconds, he’s on top of Paulo Costa. He’s smearing his broken-nose-blood all over Paulo's face, and Paulo's like laughing for a second. It was just one of the most insane, beautiful things I've ever seen. Even though he lost the fight, it was like poetry. And, yeah, that's a part of it too. It's not just winning and losing, you know? There's a performative aspect to it, and there's a poetry to it.

A recurring element in the work you have on display is the depiction of the fighters as having this kind of closeness with each other, even as they compete. There's almost a vulnerability, if not an intimacy, displayed there.

I joke, but there's an Onion post that’s, like, “girlfriend's favorite part of UFC is when the fighters hug." [Laughs.] But that's a real thing! They always cut to a commercial in the pay-per-views, because they get so pissed that these fighters would be embracing and touching each other's faces for, like, 10 minutes after the fight where they've just been trying so hard to break each other's skulls. There's no actual hate there in a lot of cases, it’s that these are people who respect each other, who are competing. And yeah, it is intimate. It's a really physical contest, but that’s not what an outsider might perceive.

You're a defiantly queer artist working in spaces that are often coded, rightly or wrongly, as conservative. For instance, the UFC is doing a show on the White House lawn soon. Does your perspective impact your approach, and do you even agree with that perception?

Yes, I heard someone referring to my stuff as MAGA-bait at the fair earlier, and I'm like, that's such an ignorant liberal take. I mean, it makes sense from an outsider who doesn't know that these are fighters from all over the world. You know, if they saw how the whole country of Myanmar is shut down next Saturday to celebrate Josh Van… no businesses are open. It's a global sport. And just because this one fascist organization has the monopoly on presenting it in the United States, that doesn’t entirely reflect the people who support the sport and the people who watch. And it certainly doesn't take away or reduce my love for it.