December 19th ~ January 8th , 2018

Opening Reception: December 19th, 2017 6-8PM

Artist Statement (excerpt)

"I have drawn many drawings on round potteries. Starting from a point and then when I draw a line with a brush, then I meet that point again. As I make artworks, I do not view them side to side nor up and down. I think of surfaces as round with a notion of infinity. I pursue for an infinite space. I studied and majored in Oriental Arts from Seoul National University. Up to this time, my artworks were done with ink and brush on rice papers, and then they were glued down and colored with acrylic paint on a canvas. My art pieces are like a combination of Eastern Oriental art and Western fine art. I have started to use ink and acrylic paint in 1984. On January I, 1992, I saw a sunrise that was much bigger and higher than I was over the sea in Montauk, New York. From that point, for about 6 months, I drove 30 minutes from my house in Tenafly, NJ to Hudson River to see a sunrise. It was a great joy for me to see a small point of light shining to become a huge sun in the midst of darkness. The sun means hope to me. And still the sun is the theme of my artwork."

The Paintings of Boonja Choi by Eleanor Heartney

“This may be the aspect of her paintings which owes the most to her Eastern identity. Though these are works of breathtaking originality, they do not flash that uniqueness like a badge of honor. Instead, they willingly acknowledge their connections both to traditional Korean painting and to the explorations of western modernists from the Impressionists to the Cubists to the Expressionists. Spanning a succession of supposedly unbridgeable chasms, the paintings of Boon-Ja Choi reveal the harmony that grows out of diversity. Thus, they remind us that, even in our fragmented and divisive world, it is still possible for art to bring us together.”

Eleanor Heartney is a contributing editor for Art in America and the author of Art Today (Phaidon, 2008) and co-author of After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (Prestel, 2007)