Dead Birds is a series of paintings completed during Sun Woo's artist in residence at the School of Visual Arts under the Painting and Mixed Media program. The series seeks to uncover a subconscious, affective way of explaining Manhattan and Queens, where they spent their time sketching, observing, and reading — with a focus placed on the ecological histories that made up the parts of the city.

The paintings were exhibited alongside 24 intuitive, symbolic drawings of objects and ideas — drawings and shapes that make up the compositional arrangements of their paintings.

This project investigates the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (the Patch) as a contested and paradoxical site of disposal, circulation, and fluidity. Through an engagement with gyres, currents, plastics, marine bodies, and migrational histories, the project presents the Patch as a haunted site of the Anthropocene— one in which various types of ghosts mingle and converge in a manner that disrupts common divisions such as land/sea and life/death. This investigation is necessarily a hybrid one,  utilizing shifts in tone and form to explore the Patch through multiple forms of knowledge representation, including theoretical analysis, close reading, diagramming, personal reflections, maps, and imaginative experiments.