Esther M. Choi (b. Toronto, Canada; lives in New York) makes photographs, installations, and texts that trace how surfaces render invisible the material and political conditions they depend on.

Choi integrates photographic production and postproduction techniques, used in the image economy, as subtle signifiers. Her images often begin as sculptures and sets built from industrially processed natural resources and synthetic substances—petroleum, plastic, semi-precious stone, cultivated wheat, laboratory-grown crystals, plastic fur and foliage—assembled from 40-60 photographs into composites that suspend the threshold between still life and landscape, and between photography's artifice and the logics of synthetic materiality.

Choi's practice extends into everyday media infrastructures, entering their circulatory systems to make visible what those systems conceal. Le Corbuffet (Prestel, 2019), a James Beard nominated artist's book, co-opted cookbook publishing to examine the intersections of culinary culture, image culture, politics, and access. Office Hours (2020–2024) established a transnational online network for thousands of cultural workers across thirty countries. Public Service (2022–2025), supported by the Ford Foundation, produced a YouTube series featuring conversations among leading BIPOC cultural practitioners.

Her writing has appeared in Artforum, E-Flux, Harvard Design Magazine, and Perspecta. She is coeditor of Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else (MIT Press, 2010) and Architecture Is All Over (Columbia University Press, 2017). A 2022 Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art, Choi holds a PhD from Princeton University and degrees from Harvard University (MDes), Concordia University (MFA), and Toronto Metropolitan University (BFA). 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