Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Sophia Chai: Character Space
Light Work Gallery

Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

In 1987, Chai immigrated to New York City from South Korea as a teenager without knowing English. Looking back, she has described that experience as feeling untethered to any internal compass that she could use to navigate her place in a new country with a new language. She visually explains these experiences to us by reinterpreting the Korean language's characters in photographs that enable us to see the contradictions of visual and verbal communication. Her images rest in the space between intellect and intuition. Chai's curiosity about the interior space of her tool — the large format camera, comparable to the interior space of a mouth — leads to the idea of the camera obscura, a darkened room with a small opening to the world.