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Susie Choi is an artist working across ceramics, sculpture and installation on Gadigal and Wangal land. Born in Auburn to South Korean migrant parents, Choi’s latest body of work continues her exploration of materiality and perception. The interplay between hard and soft playfully dissects tensions around identity experienced by people of colour and children of migrants. The inflated life preserver form, an icon of the Australian Summer, has been rendered hard yet fragile and decorated with silk cord in the colours of children’s traditional Korean hanbok clothing. Spheres and cubes reference aspects of material culture the artist grew up with, such as Korean vessels and cabinetry, while also speaking to memories of childhood learning and play.
This latest body of work presents a range of ideas, in flux, and at various stages. It comes out of my struggle to make sense of many things I care about and how this might make its way into the work. Like many of us, I worry every day about issues like polarisation, cohesion and safety, and I have to remind myself that art is one of these places where anything should be possible. In the privileged corner of the world that I live in, creation, imagination and making “mistakes” seem key. As a primary school kid, my aunt taught me how to knit, and in high school I learned how to sew, and I’ve kept both practices going. It’s interesting now to open up material conversations in my art practice to include wool and yarn, as well as nostalgic fabric patterning, amongst the porcelain, nylon and silk. When you follow a knitting pattern, you keep track of the right side (RS) and the wrong side (WS) so that you get what you expect and the stitches on the outside of your garment look “right”. I have wondered though how we decided upon what is the RS and WS of a stitch; despite having an intuitive sense of which way is “right”, I assume in some parallel universe it is reversed, you can decide which way you’ll do it or there is no such thing.
Susie Choi, 2026
