Watery Body I — Hyeryeong Choe

Hyeryeong Choe
known as Heebi
based in Rotterdam, NL

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Becoming a Watery Body
I. The Uncontrollable Death
II. The Uncontrollable Flow
III. The Uncontrollable Becoming
IV. The Uncontrollable Connection
— Bibliography / List of Figures

Becoming a Watery Body
: Leaking Body and Watery Vitality

Graduation Thesis
16.04.2026

FIG.1

A figure with green hair and an enormously swollen leg is sinking into the water. A long mass, growing from the inside of the figure’s mouth, blocks both the nose and the mouth, making it impossible to breathe. Weighed down by this mass, the body continues to sink deeper and deeper into the water. The figure does not struggle or cry out. Not only because it cannot, but also because it no longer has the will to do so. It is a state of endless helplessness in the face of what lies beyond one’s control. The body is continuously pulled downward, deeper and deeper. Above this scene, the surface of the water is shown from another perspective. Waves form in fluid shapes along the bodies of swimming fish. The fish move peacefully through the water, yet tears of blood stream from their eyes.

I. Introduction:
The Uncontrollable Death

My mom passed away after a three-year struggle with lung cancer. During those years of witnessing her illness and approaching death, I came to realise that death is something that cannot be overcome. The problems I had faced before then always seemed to have a possible solution, a way to confront or work through them. But no matter what I did, the fact that my mom would soon die did not change. There was nothing I could solve. The cancer kept spreading. My mom became weaker and weaker. She lost weight. Her hair fell out. Eventually, she could no longer walk, eat, or swallow. No matter how desperately I tried to hold it back, time continued to move forward, and her death came closer. Like trying to grasp water that slips through the gaps between my fingers, there was no way to stop the loss of my mom. Faced with the death that was steadily approaching, there was nothing I could do.

My mom’s body began to change rapidly. These changes were signs that she was nearing death. And yet, when I looked at my mom’s swollen and distorted body from pleural and abdominal fluid, I felt some awe. Perhaps it was because I loved her, and even her distorted form looked beautiful to me. Perhaps it was because she playfully said, “Look at this, isn’t it strange?” when she showed it to me. But as I watched her body quickly depart from what is so-called a “normal” form, escaping every medical treatment to control it, I felt a powerful vitality within it. My mom’s twisted body was a manifestation of that living force. And in front of that force, I felt an endless helplessness. At the same time that I was confronted with the astonishing vitality of the body, I had to accept that the body of my mom that I knew was changing irreversibly. The flesh I had known so well, the texture of her skin when she hugged me, the warmth I felt against my own body, the softness that wrapped around me. All of it was disappearing far too quickly. The body of my mom that I used to know was breaking apart and transforming in front of my eyes. And there was nothing I could preserve. The body exceeded the self. No rational solution, no medical technology could control the turbulent generative energy of the body.

Watching death that is impossible to block as water flows inside, I paradoxically began to sense what I can call the aliveness of the body. From that moment, my own body began to feel strangely unfamiliar. When I urinate and the warm stream from the inside of my body touches my skin. When menstrual blood suddenly gushes out. When beads of sweat gather on my forehead and roll downward. When I kiss my lover and feel his saliva inside my mouth. In these moments, I felt that my body was alive in itself, radiating an intense force. The body flows, leaks, seeps, and soaks into one another. Whether I want it or not, the body continues to flow, to emit, to mix. The fluidity of the body is an expression of life in motion. Bodily fluids seep out and undo the idea of a rational, self-contained subject, just as death overflows the limits of logic and technology. In the time of watching my mom dying and the moments when I became aware of the fluid sensations of my own body, a question began to take shape for me: What is aliveness? In what moments does life reveal itself the most? The vitality of the body that I experienced appeared in moments that were fluid, leaking, and beyond control. This thesis begins from this point. I call this uncontrollable, fluid aliveness watery vitality. It is a material force of aliveness that emerges through the flow, leakage, and mixing of bodily fluids. It reveals that the vitality of the body is not within the individual’s body. In this process, the boundaries of the self dissolve,
and the body becomes open to transformation through its mixing with other bodies.

However, this thesis argues that watery vitality is also a paradoxical figure. While it expresses an ecstatic and beautiful energy of life, it simultaneously renders beings completely powerless. Just as water is the source of life while always carrying the potential to drown me, watery vitality holds the same paradox. It is an overwhelming energy of aliveness. So intense that it destabilises and engulfs the subject. This thesis explores this ambivalent force and the moments in which it is phenomenologically experienced.

1) Methodology

This research takes the form of autotheory, exploring my experience as a daughter who witnessed her mom’s death and began to sense the material vitality of her own body. It is also a practice-based project that engages with visual images. However, rather than visualising arguments or illustrating theoretical ideas, this study proceeds by interpreting images to uncover the significance embedded in them. By examining the visual elements that appear in my drawings, I ask why these elements emerge, what they might signify, and how they ultimately connect to my experience of the aliveness of the body that arose while witnessing my mom’s death. I am often asked what I am thinking about while drawing. In fact, what I try the most to do when I draw is not to think at all. In those moments, the impressions that have remained strongly with me, and the sensations I have been feeling unconsciously, begin to leak out onto the surface. In this sense, drawing can be understood as another mode of autotheory. Drawing is leaving traces on a surface of what I feel, in the form of images. The aliveness of the body that I call watery vitality emerges at a level prior to its capture in conceptual language. For this reason, it is more appropriate to trace the shape of this force through drawing, which is an expression of material sensation. Therefore, in this research, drawing does not function as a final outcome or as a visual illustration of ideas, but as a site of enactment. The elements that appear within the images are traces of experiences that have not yet been articulated in language. By returning to and interpreting these images, this thesis explores how the bodily sensations I have experienced can unfold into thought.

In this methodology, writing and drawing are not two separate activities but parts of a single, interwoven practice. Bodily sensations first appear as images, which are then interpreted through language. This thesis follows the movement from experience to image and from image to thought, to ask what the aliveness of the body might be.

2) Aim of the Research

I think about what it is to be alive. I sense my excreting body. I sense my menstruating body. I sense bodily fluids mixing. I think about birth.

Beginning from my own experience, this research explores the possibility of thinking about vitality through bodily sensation. In particular, it investigates the aliveness of the body through the watery quality of bodily fluids, as they flow and leak. From the position of a daughter who came to recognise vitality through her mom’s body, this research engages with the processes of pregnancy and birth. It then extends towards an embodiment of Deleuze’s concept of becoming. Through these connections, I seek to describe the body’s generative force through a sensory phenomenology of bodily fluids. Rather than treating becoming as an abstract ontology, I attempt to grasp it through the lived sensations of the body as it actually leaks and flows. How does the aliveness of the body appear in those moments when bodies overflow, seep into one another, and wet each other? This thesis follows this question to explore the flows and becoming of the body, and the possibilities of its relations with other bodies. In doing so, it reveals how the notion of a complete and independent subject collapses, and how the body is always open, situated within ongoing processes of connection and transformation.