Sam Woo-Ram Choi, Unanchored Light: Opening 5pm, Thursday 4 September
"Unanchored Light reflects a life lived between places, where movement, memory, and the sky become a shared language. Suns, moons, and stars serve as symbols that are both universal and culturally distinct. These works explore how identity can drift, adapt, and take new forms. Light here is not fixed but shifting, carrying warmth, distance, and the quiet resonance of belonging in more than one world.
As a Korean artist living in New Zealand, I carry a sense of being between places. My life has been shaped by movement, memory, and the experience of diaspora. Celestial symbols appear often in both Eastern and Western traditions, yet I have found myself distanced from Western myths and interpretations of them. Their stories carried a sense of distance, as they spoke from traditions that did not echo my own cultural background. In response, I began to create my own expressions of the sun, moon, and stars — images that reflect my perspective and sense of belonging.
Stars, the sun, and the moon are at once familiar and distant, fixed yet shifting. They allow me to explore identity, presence, and connection. These symbols speak to how we exist alone and how we relate to others and the world around us. In the Together and Apart series, each star holds its own presence yet forms a quiet constellation when placed together, reflecting relationships that are fragile, balanced, and alive.
Memory of a Sun demonstrates how texture and mark-making can carry memory. The surface is built through layered gestures, subtle marks, and traces of movement, capturing the warmth, light, and emotional resonance of memory. These textures invite the viewer to feel both the process of making and the presence that emerges from human touch, bridging the symbolic and the personal.
Through these works, I aim to share not only an aesthetic experience but also a story of navigating multiple worlds of memory and movement, and of finding connection and meaning in both apartness and togetherness."
Sam Woo-Ram Choi
View the online catalogue here.
Sam Woo-Ram Choi
Unanchored Light
To live between places is to live between languages, traditions, and landscapes. For Korean-born, New Zealand–based artist and designer Sam Woo-Ram Choi, this condition of in-betweenness is not an abstract idea but the quiet rhythm of everyday life. His new series Unanchored Light takes the sun, moon, and stars as enduring symbols through which to explore belonging, distance, and the resonance of memory. These works invite us to consider how identity shifts as it traverses multiple worlds, and how light itself, always present yet never fixed, becomes a metaphor for human connection.
Unanchored Light is shaped by Choi’s diasporic experience. Celestial symbols appear throughout both Eastern and Western cultural traditions, yet many of the Western myths he encountered felt distant and disconnected from his heritage. In response, he began creating his own visual languages of the sun, moon, and stars, images that reframe cosmic forms as personal emblems of belonging.
The suspended Together and Apart series features three star-like sculptures, a mini constellation, each hand-turned from exotic timbers: Purpleheart, Ebony, and Sycamore. Another work, Memory of a Sun (torched, wire-brushed, graphite-covered Redwood, Ebony and Brass), reveals how texture can carry the residue of touch and time. Its layered marks and gestural surfaces conjure warmth and resonance, suggesting that memory lives as much in material as in recollection.
Across the exhibition, Choi’s works operate as both aesthetic experiences and personal narratives of negotiating distance, proximity, and identity. They embody the paradox of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once, an experience familiar to many living across cultures.
Alongside his artistic practice, Choi is the maker behind Walk in the Park, a New Zealand–based wood-working design studio he established in 2016. With formal training in furniture design from Hong-ik University in Korea, he turned to wood-turning as a way to deepen his engagement with material. From his Auckland studio he hand-crafts functional and sculptural forms, each piece paying homage to the extraordinary variation of New Zealand’s timbers, both native and introduced. This practice blurs the line between art and design, bringing together the organic and the domestic in objects that are as beautiful as they are functional.
Choi’s approach to wood-turning is intuitive rather than strictly planned. Rather than drafting precise technical drawings, he often begins with a mental sketch, or at times no plan at all, and allows the wood to guide the process. This openness to discovery reflects his interest in letting forms emerge naturally, shaped as much by the qualities of the material as by his own intention. In many ways, the responsiveness of this process mirrors the shifting light and drifting identities explored in Unanchored Light: both are practices of attunement, of listening to what is already present.
Much of the wood Choi works with comes from local, air-dried sources, often considered unsuitable by commercial standards because of knots, cracks, or irregularities. Where industrial makers might see defects, Choi sees possibilities. These natural variations become central features of his work, celebrated rather than concealed. His fondness for swamp kauri, for example, arises from the way oil finishes can transform its surfaces into luminous, jewel-like depths. Each imperfection tells a story of time, place, and transformation, echoing the ways that human lives too are shaped by fractures and irregularities.
Working with such unpredictable material is not without challenge. Transitioning from kiln-dried timbers in his studies to the complex realities of local wood meant developing an entirely new sensitivity to how each species reacts to drying and shaping. This learning process required patience and resilience, but it also deepened his respect for the material’s agency. Rather than forcing wood into predetermined forms, Choi works with its tendencies, allowing each piece to become what it wants to be.
Seen together, Unanchored Light and Walk in the Park reveal two complementary sides of Choi’s practice. One side looks skyward, seeking meaning in the drifting symbols of the cosmos; the other looks downward, into the grounded tactility of timber and the labour of the hand. Both embody his ongoing negotiation of identity across cultures, places, and traditions. Both remind us that belonging is not a fixed point but a practice, something built, felt, and reimagined over time.