Yoonhee Choi

Yoonhee Choi is a multidisciplinary artist who often uses paper and installation components in her art. Choi’s background in city planning and architecture informs her visual explorations, which include processes of reordering. Her works using everyday materials seem to reinvent items, breathing new life into found objects. The re-categorization feels both playful and analytical, such as in Best By, where she pinned hundreds of plastic bread tags, like entomological specimens, to a gallery wall. The orderly clusters of colorful squares looked mapped into place, invoking aerial views of houses or jaunty buildings. A similar methodology exists in her collages, which incorporate tiny geometric shapes cut from bits of brightly hued tape, sometimes strung together in loops and other times held in place by the implied lines of her compositions. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where she previously showed at Blackfish Gallery.

Choi has a Bachelor of Engineering in City Planning from Hong-ik University in Seoul, South Korea; a Master of Architecture from Yale University in New Haven, CT; and a Diploma of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. She recently completed residencies at C3:initiative in Portland, and the Jordan Schnitzer Printmaking Residency at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. She taught architecture at Portland State University from 2007-2016.