Esther M. Choi (b. Toronto, Canada; lives in New York) works primarily in photography, producing large-scale compositions and installations. Trained in photography and the histories and theories of art, architecture, and the life sciences, her work moves through questions of how representation makes nature, history, and value legible.

Choi often builds her images from industrially processed and synthetic substances — petroleum, plastic, semi-precious stone, cultivated wheat, laboratory-grown crystals, artificial fur, plastic foliage — constructing sculptures and sets that occupy the compositional space of still life and landscape. The work sits at the threshold between photography's own artificiality and the logic of materials engineered to simulate the natural world.

Her writing extends the same preoccupations. Texts have appeared in Artforum, Harvard Design Magazine, E-Flux, and Perspecta. She is the author of Le Corbuffet (Prestel, 2019) and coeditor of Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else (MIT Press, 2010) and Architecture Is All Over (Columbia University Press, 2017). She is the creator of the collaborative platforms Office Hours and Public Service.

Choi holds a PhD from Princeton University and degrees from Harvard University (MDes), Concordia University (MFA), and Toronto Metropolitan University (BFA). She was a 2022 Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, Graham Foundation, and the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada.

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Contact: studio (at) estherchoi (dot) net