photo by Jim Barcus
An accomplished filmmaker, the 2026 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Winner moves into sculpture and image-making
Soon after Heehyun Choi arrived in Kansas City in 2023, to join the film faculty at the Kansas City Art Institute, her new colleagues connected her to the folks at Stray Cat Film Center, the Crossroads indie theater. Just a few weeks later, Choi was mounting her own program at Stray Cat, screening six experimental art films she’d made during her years at the California Institute of the Arts. The evening was, Choi says, “a way for me start my time here.”
Choi has started in different places several times. Each relocation has offered opportunity for exploration and expansion, including her recent Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award. Born in Los Angeles, she grew up mostly in Korea, and considers herself “much more comfortable with Korean culture.” She attended college at Sogang University in Seoul, majoring in media art but also taking numerous philosophy, literature and sociology classes, in which she was inspired by “scholars and thinkers trying to understand the world.” “I wanted to do that too,” Choi says, “and art is my way of doing that. I was very certain I wanted to make my own art — I just didn’t know what form or structure.”
That spirit of openness inspired her return to Los Angeles. “If not for grad school I would have lived in Korea for my entire life,” she muses. “But I wanted an environment that was very international, to meet colleagues from different parts of the world. That was the thing I was certain about.”
The transition from undergrad in Korea to the United States brought a pivotal realization: “The very first time I noticed a difference was a very early piece in grad school. It was a very formalistic structural work and I was performing in it only because I needed someone to perform. But once I started screening it, I immediately understood that seeing a Korean woman onscreen becomes a matter of representation. I was surprised to understand that the image of a person is never neutral and always political. In Korea I don’t get that question, obviously, because there it’s not a surprise to see a Korean person onscreen. From then on I always proactively think of myself as performing, and use myself a lot.”
After grad school came the opportunity to teach filmmaking at the Kansas City Art Institute, and more opportunity to broaden. “I was open to what this new place would bring to my practice. Not just because I was moving to a new city but at that point in my career I was mostly showing my work in festivals and in theatrical spaces, and I was interested to know how my work would look in gallery and exhibition spaces.”
“Being here, one of the greatest things is that I started to see my work and present my work in a greater visual art context rather than just the film world. The art scene here in Kansas City is very open — the artists are very close to each other; it’s easier to connect with artists in different disciplines. In a way all of that influenced me to create my work not just in the film world but in installations and other forms.”
“The transition happened naturally because my interests started to expand from just being about film to more about image. I started thinking about photography and how images were made and the reasons they were made, and started bringing those ideas into my work.”
Some of those ideas are currently on view at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in the group show “The World in Kansas City”. “It started when I went to Korea over one winter break and my grandmother gave me a bunch of bojagi that had been used for my parents’ wedding.”
A traditional Korean textile art form dating back more than a thousand years, bojagi are decorative wrapping cloths made from scraps of fabrics that have been pieced, quilted and embroidered. Handmade by female family members and passed down from generation to generation, bojagi mark major life events, the wrappings treasured as much as the gifts they present. These heirlooms are functional, humble, ceremonial and deeply personal.
Bojagi make an appearance in A Motionless Movie, Choi’s film piece in the Kemper show, in which we see some of the earliest motion cameras, which mimicked hunting rifles. Within this context, we see Choi’s family’s exquisite heirloom bojagi elegantly wrapped and tied around vintage movie cameras. The striking image of the colorful Korean female handiworks juxtaposed against the black and metal camera machinery sparks a rich conversation.
The bojagi have also transcended the screen, into the 3D gallery space: “Bojagi started me thinking about fabric, not only as it relates to the domestic life of women but also that movie screens are a type of fabric — screens as bojagi and bojagi as screens.”
What’s more, Choi points out, film editing is a kind of patchwork, stitching and patching together clips to make a whole, not dissimilar from making bojagi. With editing also traditionally done by women (including classics from Lawrence of Arabia and The Wizard of Oz to Star Wars and Jaws), Choi says, “I couldn’t resist myself from connecting all these things.”
In recent work that synthesizes and comments on these histories, Choi prints out archival photos of Korea and pieces them together into movie-screen-sized bojagi, which she then hand-embroiders with familiar Korean motifs such as flying cranes.
Though Choi has racked up an impressive number of film awards and honors, she says, “The Charlotte Street recognition means a lot, because it’s a visual artist award, and my cohorts are a painter and sculptor.”
As Choi prepares for this fall’s Charlotte Street Visual Artists Awards exhibition at the Kansas City Art Institute’s Emily & Todd Voth Artspace: “I’m planning to expand more on the idea of combining embroidery and moving image.”
