Boram Choi South Korean, b. 1985

Boram Choi is a Korean ceramic artist who lives and works on Jeju Island, South Korea. She reinterprets Korea’s blue-and-white ceramic tradition through arresting sculptural vessels that resist its customary refinement, symmetry and functionality.

Choi recreates classical forms, including the moon jar, through an unconventional and intensely labour-intensive process. Rather than throwing her vessels on a wheel, she constructs them by hand from numerous small, cloud-like patches of coarse clay. The joins remain visible, giving each form an irregular structure and revealing the physical process of its making. Choi then treats the vessel as a canvas, drawing thousands of delicate cobalt lines and patterns directly onto the raw stoneware to connect one patch to another.

Her vessels are fired without glaze, removing their conventional functionality while preserving the raw texture of the clay, exposed seams and subtle traces of her hand. Through this contrast between familiar silhouettes and unresolved surfaces, Choi transforms traditional blue and white into an optically charged contemporary language. Pattern is no longer applied simply as decoration but becomes a means of articulating structure, rhythm and accumulated labour.

Choi’s recent work marks an increasingly conceptual development of her established Blue Jar series. While earlier vessels were densely inscribed, creating a sense of completion through the rhythmic accumulation of lines, her latest series, Blue Jar – Undoing, introduces the void as an active element. Areas of unmarked clay interrupt the cobalt fields, allowing emptiness itself to shape the composition. These pauses create a tension between presence and absence, while offering the artist space to step back from the intensity of her process.

Through Undoing, Choi deliberately works against the visual language she has refined over many years. The exposed and seemingly unfinished surfaces embody the challenge of releasing familiar habits and resisting completion. Blue and white becomes not a resolved aesthetic but a dynamic field shaped by gesture, interruption and absence. By confronting her own conventions, Choi transforms the vessel into a site of tension between control and release, tradition and change.

Choi’s work is held in prominent collections, including The British Museum and the Chatsworth House Collection, UK. Her work has also been presented at Chatsworth House in the exhibition Living with Art We Love.