Sang-ah Choi is a visual artist living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work visually explores the vulnerability of seeing, and examines the possibilities that ambiguity brings. Growing up in Korea and moving to the United States, she explores ‘betweenness’ and ‘transiency’ of boundaries of drawing, painting, book format, cultural heritages, materiality, imagery, and abstraction. Choi’s painting process involves drawing, painting, cutting, gluing and layering on paper from small book scale to site specific installation with moving images. Her works have been featured in solo and group shows nationally and internationally, in Portland, New York, Seoul, Venice, Shanghai, Taipei, etc. She received her BFA and MFA from Ewha Women’s University in Seoul and an MFA in Painting from University Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Artist Statement
I visually explore the vulnerability of seeing and the possibility that ambiguity brings. Growing up in Korea and moving to the United States, I was interested in the unconscious paradox and uncertainty of ‘the way of seeing’, which is revealed by the differences in how different cultures view each other. Perceiving the changes in my perspective that I experienced through this process, I try to explore and expand the possibility of ‘seeing’ by breaking its cultural and social limitations and pursuing new ways of seeing through my visual practice. In my work, I have often borrowed the traditional Korean cultural symbols which embodied the understanding of the relationship between nature and the human condition, and layered them with contemporary cultural and social icons to depict the landscape we live in now. In recent years, I started embracing the philosophy of traditional Korean and Chinese landscape paintings (known as Shan Shui) with painting being the object of the viewer's mind, rather than being a window for the eyes, and the ‘state of flow’ and the ‘presentness’ in my works. I explore how my painting process stimulates a reciprocal unity of the materiality and imagery of painting: seeing enhances experiences and these experiences embody being. Through my art practice, I continuously intertwine my personal heritage and the landscape I live in now to contemplate the meaning of life.
My painting process involves investigating the physical, material and intuitive ‘presence’ in the painting. I embrace the elements of chance and ‘happening’ as a means to bring out the unfamiliar. This is done by breaking the physical limitations of the painting materials. For example, while folding or cutting paper, I focus on the moments when the painting material, e.g. paints, graphite and paper, and the imagery, e.g. bodily images and eyes, form a relationship. And as these instances accumulate, seeing, experiencing and being organically intertwine with each other, revealing the flow of intuition naturally. Paper painted with water-rich acrylic reveals the pigments as poignant patterns and shows the nature of the paper as it dries, while the stencil rubbed with graphite leaves a ghostly shadow, leaving traces of the material thickness of the paper as an image. The reciprocal connections between the materiality and imagery built by the painting process stimulate the intuitive process of painting. For me, painting is perceiving and accumulating these moments that help to explore the sensibility of new perspectives.
CV
One-person Exhibition
2019 Landscape: about space and time, North View Gallery, PCC Sylvania, Portland, Oregon
2015 Humming in the ubiquitous beauty, Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, Oregon
2014 (in)Tangible Being, Fairbanks gallery, Corvallis, Oregon
2013 Sang-ah Choi, Apex Series (essay by Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson), Portland Art Museum
2012 American Beauty: Art in the Governor’s Office, Salem, Oregon
2011 Fab:topia, Chambers @916 gallery, Portland, Oregon
2010 Insatiable Appetite (essay by Miriam Kienle), Doosan Gallery, New York
2009 “Kyu”-Layering (curated by Shin-won Hwang), Seoul, Sarubia Dabang, Seoul
2009 Sang-ah Choi, Arario Gallery, New York
2005 Moremoremore,(essay by Buzz Spector) Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois
2004 Ultra Immortality, Sandra Gering Gallery, New York
2003 Mutation-Immortality (essay by Tim van Laar), I Space, Chicago
2003. Blowing Bubbles (essay by Jonathan Fineberg), Sandra Gering Gallery, New York
Selected Group Exhibition
2023 A New Family : Curating Korean Diaspora, Gallery Korea at the Korean Cultural Center, New York (curated by Jae-won Choi)
2022 Dialogues Across Disciplines, Building a Teaching Collection at the Wellin Museum, Hamilton College, New York
Your Present, Pace gallery, Seoul (curated by Jee Young Maeng)
My Present, Wess, Seoul
2021 One at a time, Wess, Seoul (curated by Jee Young Maeng)
2020 Art of Love, Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea
2018 Book Conversations: Part 1, LMAK Gallery/Books and Design, New York
2017 Hold on Tight, Nine Gallery, Portland
2014 Uncanny spaces, Usdan gallery, Bennington college, Vermont
2013 We tells ourselves stories in order to live, Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland
2012 Art on Paper 2012: the 42nd Exhibition, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina
Central Booking in Berlin, K-Salon, Berlin
Future Pass, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
On Temporal Being, Edwin’s Gallery, Jakarta, Indonesia
Portland 2012: A Biennial of Contemporary Art, White Box, Portland
2011 Connecting, Chambers@916, Portland
Future Pass, la Biennale di Venezia, Venice, traveled to Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam;Today Art Museum, Beijing.
Perimeter: We live here now, Art Gym gallery, Portland
2010 Four American Landscapes:Sang-ah Choi, Jeffrey Jones, Andrew Lenaghan and Joel Ross, Randolf College Museum, Virginia and Traveled to George Adams Gallery, New York
Narrative Sequences, Center for the book art, New York
Cut, Shuffle and Draw, Columbus state University, Columbus, Georgia
2009 Animamix Biennial, MoCA, Shanghai, China
Anthropology, Central booking, Dumbo, NY
Lunar's Walking, Ewha Art Center, Seoul
2008 Ithaca Collects, Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Ehwa Artists, Ewha Womans University Museum, Seoul
2007 Meet Cute, Heskin Contemporary, New York
2006 Young Seeks, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul
Behind the Image, Cais Gallery, Seoul
2005 Echo beyond time, Ewha Womans University Museum, Seoul
2004 Approaches, Gallery 555, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Fiction.Love, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei
2003 Painting!, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Michigan
2002 Mixer 02, Monique Meloche, Chicago
Luscious Too, Zolla/Lieberman, Chicago
Ballpoint Inklings, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Social Landscape, P.P.O.W, New York
MFA Exhibition, Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois
Nubo Wave Map (Space) Bubble, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois
2001 Right on the Wall, Wesleyan University, Bloomington
Today in 8 Parts, I Space, Chicago
College Art Association Regional MFA Exhibition, I Space, Chicago
2000 Amuse, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois
MFA Annual 2000, New American Paintings
Public Collections
New York Public Library, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Portland Art Museum, Portland
The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia
Maier Museum of Art, Lynchburg, Virginia
UNEEC Culture and Education Foundation, Taipei
Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York
Awards & Nominations
2022 Cubberley Artist Studio Program
2021 Nominated for Joan Michell Fellowship
2013 Center for the Visual Arts' artist-in residency through Ford family foundation, Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Oregon
2013 Visual arts @Temenggong residency program, Singapore
2012 Contemporary Northwest Art Award Finalist, Portland Art Museum, Portland
2012 VCCA residency fellowship (credit: Columbus School for Girls Endowment)
2011 Hallie Ford Fellows in the Visual Art for 2011
2001-2011 Elizabeth Foundation for the arts studio program
© 2023 by sang-ah choi