[Interview] Building a Home, Line by Line: The Etched Worlds of Sunnu Rebecca Choi

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On an October morning, I made my way to Thames-Side Studios in Woolwich to meet Sunnu Rebecca Choi. She first showed with 4482 in Kingston, and our current exhibition marks our second collaboration. "I'm Sunnu Rebecca Choi, a Korean-Canadian illustrator and printmaker based in London," she says by way of introduction. The modesty belies a remarkable year: in 2026 alone she won the Bologna Children's Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition and was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers.

In her studio, we talked about the long road that led her to etching, the search for a place to call home, and the stories she is now writing herself.

A Winding Road to the Page

Sunnu's path into illustration was anything but direct. After studying fashion design in New York, she spent almost ten years as a fashion designer in New York and Toronto, working across womenswear, knitwear, menswear and activewear, and even launching her own yogawear brand along the way. Yet a question kept nagging at her. "Is this really what I wanted?" she recalls. "There was a huge gap between the fashion design I wanted to do and the design that paid the bills."

While still working, she tried almost everything. She completed a yoga teacher training, earned a certificate in flower design, applied to study graphic design, and considered an MA in fashion business. The turning point came when she rediscovered drawing as a hobby, painting watercolours at home with paints she had kept for more than a decade. Urban sketching on her travels followed, and with it a question: what else could she do with drawing? "That's when my eyes opened to illustration," she says, and editorial illustration in particular.

*Looking after your mental health during burnout*

Why not study in America? She had lived in New York for over seven years, but without a clear path to permanent residency, she eventually returned to Canada. "Living from one visa to the next, I felt my whole life was tied to my job," she says. "That was really hard." The UK offered an English-speaking alternative, a one-year master's and far lower fees. There was an old pull, too: when she first dreamed of fashion, Central Saint Martins had been on her shortlist alongside Parsons. "I thought, why not try the UK, it's only one year." She came to Kingston University for her MA in Illustration. "I never imagined I would settle here. I wanted to go to Berlin after a year."

The Patience of the Plate

Her fascination with printmaking began in Prague, at an Alphonse Mucha exhibition. Every label read "lithograph", and she went home to look it up. By chance, a printmaking studio in Vancouver, where she was living, was running a stone lithography workshop, and she signed up at once. "It was the hardest workshop of my entire life," she says. "I thought, this is simply beyond what I can do." Her time with lithography ended there, for now, but the studio also offered screenprinting and etching, and etching looked irresistible. Then the pandemic struck, and the class she had booked was cancelled. She arrived in the UK with nothing but the idea of it. "I had to try it. It stayed with me because I never got to do it." Etching was the very first thing she took up on her MA, and it suited her style so well that she fell deeper and deeper into it.

Part of the attraction is how etching works against her temperament. "I'm very impatient, and close to a perfectionist. I find it hard to accept even one small error," she says. "Etching breaks that. Once something has happened on the plate, it's so hard to correct that you end up either accepting it as it is or finding a way to work around it." She has spent weeks reworking a single plate, determined to rescue expensive materials, and sometimes those unexpected marks take a drawing somewhere new. "That trial and error was really fun for me. It felt like problem-solving."

She also enjoys the sheer labour of it. "It's like meditation. It takes a long time, and I learn something like the aesthetics of waiting." No two prints are ever the same, even from the same plate. "I love that unpredictability." It is stressful, she admits, but it is fun stress, like clearing a level in a game. "If a plate comes out wrong after I've put ten hours into it, I have nightmares every night until my next day at the print studio, running simulations in my dreams: should I try this, or that?"

Building a Home

The words Home and In Between recur throughout Sunnu's titles. She began to think about them deeply only around three years ago, when she started the series. Before that, she says, she spent decades without understanding why she was always struggling. "Living as an immigrant, drifting and never settling anywhere, I always carried depression and loneliness. Why was I always so gloomy, so negative, so full of anger? I never knew the core reason."

Home 2, Etching, Aquatint & Chine Collé, 2024 — *Home 2*, Etching, Aquatint & Chine Collé, 2024

Sunnu left Korea at fourteen, alone, without her parents. Moving to Britain, a third country after Korea and North America, for the first time she found herself a complete outsider, and an identity crisis followed. Meeting friends newly arrived from Korea, she realised how different she was from them. "In North America I had always lived as a Korean. Here, for the first time, I felt that I wasn't." It struck her that the root of her unhappiness was a missing sense of belonging. "When someone asked, ' Where are you from?, I didn't know what to say." Accepting that was where it all began. "I started looking for the belonging I had forgotten, and for home. My whole body of work has been that journey."

In Between 2, Etching, Aquatint & Chine Collé, 2023 — *In Between 2*, Etching, Aquatint & Chine Collé, 2023

In Between is still ongoing. "I define my identity as an in-between identity, one that doesn't belong here or there," she explains. The series began as a story to comfort people with the same struggle as her younger self. "It started as a children's book, and it will end as one, but the story hasn't reached that point yet." The Home series asks what home is, and why she craves it so much. "For me, home isn't just a physical place. It's a concept full of complex emotions. I was gradually discovering and building a sense of home within myself, piece by piece." Today, she feels she has found it. "For now, my definition of home is the place where I am and the very moment I'm living and creating, built up layer by layer. But who knows? It's a concept that can always change."

Next Stop, Eternity

"I'm very interested in relationships, whether between people, animals or even objects and spaces." Sunnu says, and nowhere is that clearer than in Next Stop Eternity and the prints around it, including Farewell, which 4482 has exhibited. Like much of her work, it began as a narrative for a book, written while mourning a dog. Years ago in New York, her poodle died suddenly at around eighteen months old. "I came out of the shower, and my dog had died." More than a decade later, she still dreams of her dog and still misses it. "I think a lot about how fragile life can be. My greatest fear is losing those I love, and I don't think you could ever truly be prepared for that." The story became a way of making that fear more beautiful, "almost like hypnotising myself".

Eternal Express, Etching & Aquatint, 2024 — *Eternal Express*, Etching & Aquatint, 2024

Trains run through these works, and they came to her through history. Next Stop Eternity, a long etching of about a metre, shown at the Royal Academy in 2023, was inspired by the London Necropolis Railway near Waterloo, which carried the dead to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. "The story itself was so mysterious. A train carrying the dead, and in the Victorian era it even had first, second and third class." She is drawn to abandoned buildings and the lives they once held. "I love the history within a space." The train became her image of a liminal space between life and death.

She came to understand grief later. When her dog died, she was in her early twenties, new to working life, with no time to grieve. Only years later, learning about the five stages of grief, did she finally understand the sadness she had pushed down. "I think I'm healing my old wounds through my work." That, she believes, is the power of art: it heals the artist, and the audience finds empathy and healing in it too.

Stories of Her Own

For now, there are no exhibitions on the calendar beyond the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers' members' show. Raising a young child leaves little time for new prints. Yet the studio is far from quiet: she is working on three picture books. One will be published in Korea, one is planned for the US and UK, and another has been signed with a UK publisher.

The Korean book is about the environment. A village holds a contest for the most beautiful house, while the natural world around it falls apart. The UK book, due next year, grows directly from her Bologna-winning prints: a ghost story set aboard a ghost train. Sunnu is both writing and illustrating the books herself. "These two books mark my debut as an author-illustrator", she says.

Listening to Sunnu, I kept nodding along. As a woman who has also made a life in London, far from where I started, I recognised so much in her story: building a family, keeping a practice alive, and searching for the stories she needs to tell. Perhaps that is what In Between captures so well. It is not a place of loss, but a place many of us live in, and where, plate by plate and page by page, Sunnu is building a home of her own. Her journey is still in between, and that, it seems, is exactly where her stories begin.