June Choi
June Choi (b. 2001) is a visual artist currently based in Providence, Rhode Island where they received their BFA in Painting from RISD. They predominantly work in painting, drawing, and sculpture, oftentimes thinking of ways to merge their applications into one. They are interested in materiality reminiscent of the structures and surfaces that surround us and seeing what happens when they collage and collapse.
DEC 30, 2025
June Choi finds delight in the uncertainty of process. Based in Providence, the visual artist works across painting, sculpture, and digital media, creating layered assemblages from wood, paper pulp, and cardboard. "I see collage as philosophy for building a sense of self," they explain, exploring how materials meet and boundaries collapse.
Can you tell us about your background and what led you to work across painting, drawing, sculpture, and digital media?
My earliest memories of art consist of drawing fan-art (of anything and everything) and realistic horse renderings (I really liked horses). The year I turned 13, given I hadn’t shown any other interests besides hungrily recreating images in my sketchbook, I was enrolled into weekly studio classes where I’d learn about oil painting and continue its practice for the remainder of my teens. Looking back, it wasn’t necessarily subject matter nor medium that was captivating but rather the mysterious will of expression that possesses one to make. In that sense, there is little difference between my equestrian fantasies and traditional still-life paintings.
I set upon a quest to cultivate a greater sense of my own hand in college. I started by playing with paper- stretching and stitching layers together, then followed by various inks, paints, glitter, and pastel. Material exploration eventually led me to wood, which I’ve now worked with the most consistently with. Digital collage is a newer endeavor that I have set out on practicing in the past year, when I did not have the means to paint after graduation.
From the beginning, mixed media steadily dismantled the need for a cohesive painted image and implored me to be instinctive instead. I find so much delight in the uncertainty of process and believe that creating is a calibration between the self and one's affinities, conversed with and familiarized over time.
Can you tell us about your background and what led you to work across painting, drawing, sculpture, and digital media?
My earliest memories of art consist of drawing fan-art (of anything and everything) and realistic horse renderings (I really liked horses). The year I turned 13, given I hadn’t shown any other interests besides hungrily recreating images in my sketchbook, I was enrolled into weekly studio classes where I’d learn about oil painting and continue its practice for the remainder of my teens. Looking back, it wasn’t necessarily subject matter nor medium that was captivating but rather the mysterious will of expression that possesses one to make. In that sense, there is little difference between my equestrian fantasies and traditional still-life paintings.
I set upon a quest to cultivate a greater sense of my own hand in college. I started by playing with paper- stretching and stitching layers together, then followed by various inks, paints, glitter, and pastel. Material exploration eventually led me to wood, which I’ve now worked with the most consistently with. Digital collage is a newer endeavor that I have set out on practicing in the past year, when I did not have the means to paint after graduation.
From the beginning, mixed media steadily dismantled the need for a cohesive painted image and implored me to be instinctive instead. I find so much delight in the uncertainty of process and believe that creating is a calibration between the self and one's affinities, conversed with and familiarized over time.
You describe the landscape as "an image that holds command over our ideas of personhood, origins, and material reality." How did you develop this relationship with landscape as a subject?
The Landscape is an incredibly transfigured subject reiterated tirelessly throughout art history, culture, and our collective socio-political psyche. It is a conduit for meaning (identity) and structure (freedom). During school, I sought to better understand the rootlessness I felt and found myself drawn to depicting constrained and ambiguous spaces. I thought about my upbringing, the fixtures of suburbia, and visibility.
There are many writers that have informed how I contemplate nature. Anne Anlin Cheng and her book, Ornamentalism (2019), is one wherein she deliberates on personhood not ruled by the integrity of flesh but by the very commodity of identity that is inorganic and ornamental. The subject/object crisis at the core of this theory of being has influenced how I see the nonhuman as a site for the self. Another text that I cherish is Lucas Crawford’s “The Crumple and the Scrape: Two Archi-Textures in the Mode of Queer Gender” (2020). His thoughts on how the haptic quality of our surroundings (walls, carpets, corners, kinks) directly impact our own form has driven me to make work that realizes the way we contort ourselves within perimeters. How one settles under a gaze, in the dark, surrounded by the open air; we clutch, scrape, split, and sit.
Collage or layering appeared in your work across medium. How do these approaches play a role in your work?
Working mixed-media has always been about observing the relationship between individual things. There can be resistance or the complete collapse of boundaries where individuality dissolves into obscurity. Even when it comes to something as fundamental as laying down paint on a surface, there is a meeting point between materiality and drawn, illusive image. (Like how our skin is a boundary line set from the world, an object’s surface dictates how imagery creeps into fruition and simultaneously dissolves away) I see collage as philosophy for building a sense of self/whomever/whatever, and wooden assemblage has been very fulfilling and exciting in that sense. Found wood, paper pulp, cardboard, and hanji are my favorite materials to create builds with because they are relatives- reincarnations of one another- that are coming together to become common ground.
Color and atmosphere feel very important in your work. How do you approach creating mood or feeling through your material choices?
Color is so elusive- I listen the most to intuition when it comes to it. Since a lot of pieces start off with building, the intention of the surface provides me direction as to what kind of color story should take place. A lot of recurring colors that are in my go-to line up are ones that have associated meaning or attributes that are so resonant that I believe them to be true. For instance, Pyrrol red has a fantastic plastic shine that is loud and uncanny. I use it to signify presence. Hansa yellow is for infectious and radiating light. I mix pinks with Philip Guston’s pink-hued apocalyptic skies in mind, and view white as a force of weight and cover as they appear in Susan Rothenberg’s figurative works. But of course, painting is not always such a simple recipe. Shape and texture are modes of translating color into feeling, and if something is amiss then the problem tends not to be color itself but its application, i.e., an opaque negative space that hugs versus a transparency that veils. Material enacts and thereby feels.
How does working in traditional medium differ from the way you approach digital illustration?
Surprisingly, the two actually share a lot of qualities in the fact that I am amassing from different sources and attempting to make them cohesive. The digital illustrations are primarily composed of three things: Blender textures, online and archival images, and hand-drawn scribbles. The digital textures are made in the program with geometry nodes, which then stretch onto 3D forms that are heavily applied with modifiers. The layering and intersections of planes, combined with environmental assets like light sources, make for really cool visuals. I really enjoy the idea of these calculated and artificial textures being used to create a representational image.
What directions are you exploring in your practice right now, and how do you see your work evolving?
I’m interested in implementing more drawing and patterns. I have two “character” motifs that I occasionally featured here and here over the past few years, but would like to focus on making pieces that center them. One is a snake or snake-like thing (perhaps a rope or hose?) that slips just out of reach or sight. I find it a playful way of representing hiding and escape. On the flipside, the Butterfly Man is a large-winged stick figure that stands before you to see. I think that there is a lot of possibility in their shapely lines to copy into pattern and then back to figure, transforming the background as they pull and drag space like a net.