Sophia Chai is a Korean-American artist whose work pushes the limits of photography by tracing its origins as a natural phenomenon of light and space while simultaneously pushing it forward into its most elusive, hard-to-read forms. Recent work revisits her childhood experience of learning to read Hangul, the Korean phonetic alphabet, and enacts three key ideas of language, optics, and photography.

Chai’s work has been exhibited at Light Work (Syracuse, NY), Hair+Nails Gallery (Minneapolis and New York City), Luhring Augustine (New York, NY), 106 Green (Brooklyn, NY), and Knockdown Center (Brooklyn, NY). She has received grants and residencies from the McKnight Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace program, and The First Ten, which supports mid-career artist mothers. Chai earned a BA in chemistry from the University of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is based in Rochester, MN.