The College of Arts and Architecture’s School of Visual Arts will continue its annual Anderson Lecture Series by welcoming interdisciplinary artist WonJung Choi on Wednesday, Oct. 7, at 11:30 a.m. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held at the Palmer Museum of Art.
The lecture series is supported by the John Muller Anderson endowment, which was named in honor of the professor emeritus who was an Evan Pugh research professor of philosophy and the first director of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities.
Choi, who was born in Seoul, South Korea, is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, textiles, ceramics and digital media. Her practice investigates human identity as a material record of environmental adaptation, cultural hybridity and deep-time survival.
What began as a personal inquiry, tracing her own lineage back 65,000 years through genetic testing, has since evolved into a universal narrative of human endurance. She seeks to bridge her own migratory story with the broader history of the human species, redefining the body not as a fixed entity but as a dynamic map shaped by movement and climatic pressure.
By utilizing 3D scanning, digital fabrication, ceramics and textiles, she transmutes invisible biological data into monumental topographical landscapes.
Choi’s mission is to connect this ancestral legacy with contemporary sculptural practice to reveal how radical environmental shifts are encoded in our very fabric. She believes that identity is a resilient and fluid archive of shared survival, proving that the capacity to adapt is an ancient strength we all carry.
Choi currently lives and works between the United States and South Korea. She serves as an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University while maintaining an active international exhibition practice. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees in sculpture from Hongik University in Seoul and an master's degree in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York.
For more than two decades, Choi has exhibited extensively across Asia and the United States, presenting her award-winning work at solo exhibitions in New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Gwangju, Connecticut, and Virginia. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions internationally and is part of several high-visibility permanent collections.