Esther Choi

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

Esther M. Choi is a Korean Canadian multidisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. Her work explores photography’s mimetic capacities, material conditions, and entanglements with capitalist production, as well as the media infrastructures through which images and ideas circulate. Choi’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Isis, e-flux, Harvard Design Magazine, and Perspecta. Iridescents is a series of large scale, cameraless photographs made from image captures of iridescent nylon—a prosaic, imitative material that produces a kind of "synthetic luminosity"— to reference the materiality of photography itself. Iridescence, here, looks to its symbolism in premodern East Asian cultures and other non-dualistic traditions as a marker of creation, ancestral guidance, rebirth, and hope. Choi's approach is informed by Muism—a Korean shamanic practice that survived systematic suppression and attempted erasure by industrialization and Japanese colonial rule—in the work's repurposing of cloth, an everyday material, as a conduit for ancestral or cosmic frequencies. In this way, these image fields are conceived as a series of iterations that map a territory of potential or a range of energies, akin to what poet Joy Harjo refers to as "foreseeing": entering an unknown field using the materials of our time to channel the affects, feelings, and messages needed for collective healing or nourishment. IG: @esthermchoi

Artwork