Susie Choi

For Sydney artist Susie Choi, making art is an act of reclamation, and reconnection.

In an autumn downpour I arrive at the Annandale studio of Susie Choi. The rain seems to rattle the bones of the old warehouse space, which is shared with fellow artists Glenn Barkley and Mechelle Bounpraseuth. Choi is painting colourful stripes on a large ceramic form which, she tells me, will hang from the ceiling; a first for her. Behind us a shelving unit holds countless porcelain cubes and spheres—the vertebrae of soon-to-be sculptures.

A child of the Korean diaspora, Choi grew up in Western Sydney. Her parents migrated to Australia in the 1970s and founded a cleaning company called Golden Crane Couple Service. During the day they would leave Choi with a Cantonese-speaking Vietnamese family who lived in their apartment building. Choi was a shy, anxious child, always scrutinising herself. She longed to pursue her passion, tennis, but her parents wanted her to devote herself to studying. “This was the plan before I was even conceived,” she says, “my parents named me ‘Suji,’ which means ‘excellent knowledge.’”

The downpour intensifies and Choi’s voice is swallowed by the cacophonic pattering on the tin roof. I lean in as the artist explains, openly, how her artmaking is part of a reckoning with the narrow set of ideals placed on children of migrants.

Choi played out the role of academic brainchild that her parents hoped for, completing honours in linguistics and landing a PhD fellowship in the United States. She practised as a speech pathologist for several years but found it unsatisfying. When I ask what catalysed her art career, she laughs. It was a humble handmade Studio Ghibli prop from her two-year old’s birthday party—“Everyone, including me, was surprised I could paint. I just found myself able to do it and mix colours by intuition.”

Soon after the transformative Totoro, Choi enrolled at the National Art School (NAS). She reflects, “It seems comical that that was only six years ago, but I think all those years of having my creativity sidelined in pursuit of everyone else’s dreams meant I had a deep well of ideas and actions ready to spill out.”

We wander over to a shelf stacked, like a winning Tetris configuration, with Choi’s plaster moulds. She pulls one down, labelled “small cube,” and opens it up. The faint seams of a cardboard model are imprinted into the plaster, and Choi explains that she hand-builds most of her models because she likes the imperfections. She slip-casts the moulds in porcelain, which for larger forms can be a labour-intensive battle as porcelain slip is far from forgiving.

Sometimes Choi flouts slip-casting rules by building forms with slight undercuts in them, making them difficult to extract from the mould. Then she’ll spend time sculpting and “repairing” the damage, an act that certainly seems symbolic. In Decomposition, 2023, two lustrous forms—inflated and deflated—signal the artist pushing back against perfectionism, reclaiming her authentic self. Cracked and crumpled, the “decomposed” piece hangs below its inflated counterpart, its fleshy pink body like a glob of spat out chewing gum, a doughy corporeal growth or a mound of folded skin. There is, however, endurance here—the shimmery object soft yet hard, fortified, defying its medium in a way that squeezes strength from vulnerability.

Choi’s process is part of a reckoning with a place that seemed to repeatedly misunderstand and misrepresent her. The slightly misshapen forms channel an internal dialogue about growing up as an othered person of colour, seeing her parents discriminated against as Asian migrants, and internalising the values of an Australia that lacked representation of people who look like her in popular culture. “I carry these feelings with me a lot,” she reflects. In Not from here, 2023, a porcelain inflatable ring akin to a lifebuoy is embellished with silk norigae (tassels), hatching an alien form blending beach culture with traditional Korean dress, hanbok. We see, here, the artist grappling with not feeling Australian or Korean enough. “When I was growing up, I had to try to explain what I was—that I wasn’t Chinese or Japanese, and that in fact, even though my parents were Korean, I was Australian.”

The inflatable ring has become a characterising stamp of Choi’s work. After she learned to slip-cast at NAS, she stumbled across a large blow-up ring at the two-dollar shop and felt compelled to make a mould of it. Choi identifies with the tension in inflatables, the pressure, the battle between inside and outside. “I keep coming back to the ring form because it has associations to do with my upbringing. I associate the pool ring with sun, surf, blue eyes and blonde hair. Embarrassingly I watched a lot of Aussie soap operas growing up and realised as I got older how my struggles with identity as a young person were wrapped up in the absence of representation in the media.”

On a wall in Choi’s small studio hangs an impressive new work, Jaw Breaker, 2024, which marks a milestone for the artist in size and complexity. This inflatable porcelain ring is spliced with saekdong (a series of colourful stripes used in hanbok), sprouting correspondingly coloured tassels like a psychedelic beard. There are twenty-four individual tassels, and in making them Choi had to hold the needle with her teeth. They recall the wall hanging versions of Korean norigae that adorned her childhood home. For Choi, handmaking these tassels represents a more forthright reclamation of her heritage, ameliorating feelings of loss and disconnection.

Choi mentions that she’s repulsed by the surface of Jaw Breaker, and I’m taken aback. To me, the sumptuous ivory ring is haptically alluring, beautiful even, but for Choi the puckering seams and pallid pearlescence is grotesque, bodily.

At that moment my daughter arrives at the studio, and our conversation naturally turns to motherhood, sleep deprivation, and the heavy haze of the toddler season. Choi shares that her mental health took a toll in the early years postpartum. “Having children and learning that most other parents navigated early parenthood differently to me helped me realise that I had always suffered from anxiety and depression. I had assumed that other people put themselves under the level of pressure and scrutiny that I always had, but with the help of therapy came to realise that it was actually unusual. Being responsible for two little humans, and seeing aspects of myself reflected back at me from them, gave me a lot of insight.”

Works such as Bing, 2023, and Saekdong series #4, 2022, converse with traditional children’s hanbok, their saekdong stripes recalling those worn in the artist’s own childhood. Choi has spent a lot of time developing her glazes from raw materials to reflect the canonical 7-stripes to her liking. In earlier works like Regroup, 2022, and Melody, 2022, we see the saekdong palette on cubic and spherical forms, embodying Choi’s interest in children’s blocks, playgrounds, and structural repetition in architecture, furniture, and nature.

The rain subsides and we make our way to the studio entrance. Hanging above us is a bouquet of half-deflated balloons left over from Mechelle’s daughter’s birthday party. I smile at the strange synergy between them and Choi’s ceramics. “What does art mean to you?” I ask candidly. “Art saved me,” Choi replies. “It allowed me to understand that I’d been stuffing myself into a box built by oppressive ‘shoulds,’ imposed by the internalisation of the many conflicting voices around me.” She pauses. “Art is breathing.”

This article was originally published in issue 67

Images courtesy of the artist, Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane, and Sabbia Gallery, Sydney

EXHIBITION
Searching Chords
13-31 August 2024
Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane