Kyung-hwa Choi-ahoi

Kyung-hwa Choi-ahoi (born 1967 in Seoul) is a South Korean graphic artist, author and university teacher living in Germany, with a focus on drawing.

Choi-ahoi came to Germany in 1991 to attend University, first in Trier and Mainz, where she started with studies in art history, philosophy and Latin.

In 1994 she changed universities as well as her major: Choi-ahoi enrolled in art classes at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg with KP Brehmer, Werner Büttner and Fritz W. Kramer.

Her last name is a pseudonym, a pun which plays with the status of the city of Hamburg as an important harbor city, because Hamburg became her first home in Germany.

In 1998 she completed a stage design internship at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg in the production Blau in Blau (Blue in Blue), directed by Stefan Moskov.

From 1999 to 2000 she spent a semester abroad on an Erasmus scholarship at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with Franz Graf.

In 1999 the idea was born to produce one or two diary drawings every day as part of a long-term project.

In these diary pages she processes the encounter with poetic and everyday objects, events, people and things from her personal environment.

To date she has created thousands of diary drawings, in 2021 their number counted already over 8000.

Each drawing is typewritten and dated on the front.

In 1999, Choi-ahoi's first artistic book publication Buchstäbliche Zeichnung – Zeichnerische Buchstaben (Letteral Drawing – Drawing Letters) was published by the in-house Materialverlag of the Hamburg University of Fine Arts.

In the afterword to Von Hamburg nach Wien und zurück: Tag.Buch.Zeichnung 1999 und 2000 (From Hamburg to Vienna and back: Day.Book.Drawing 1999 and 2000), published by Textem Verlag in 2020, publisher Michael Glasmeier writes:

"Inherent in the Hamburg-Vienna diary are the incessant movements of searching, trying, and orientation of a student. ... This coincides with Choi-ahoi's extraordinary and unconditional curiosity (curiositas) as a will to know, as a 'pleasure of the eyes' (Augustinus), which begins with amazement and is then transformed and appropriated through artistic, writing actions. (translated from german)"

Since 2000 she has also been working continuously on the drawing project Enzyklopädie Personae (Encyclopedia Personae), a drawn social history of her time.

It contains quick sketches of people from her environment, whom she follows for a day – from getting up to going to bed – in a drawn documentation.

In DIN A5 notebooks, she records how these people spend their day and writes down answers to personal questions.

By 2021, more than seventy of these booklets had been created.

In 2001, Choi-ahoi was awarded the Karl H. Ditze Prize in Hamburg for her diploma work.

From 2001 to 2003, after graduating, she completed postgraduate studies with Werner Büttner.

More than 200 diary drawings are part of the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle, where Kyung-hwa Choi-ahoi had her first solo exhibition in 2001 titled Fern und Nah (Far and Near).

Since 2011, Choi-ahoi has been working as a university lecturer alongside her own artistic work, initially as a lecturer in drawing at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Design, Media and Information.

Between 2012 and 2014 she worked intensively on anatomical studies.

Since then, dealing with the world of plants has found its way into the drawing project Garten (Garden).

After a residency at Ritzebüttel Castle in Cuxhaven in 2013, she started to incorporate elements from nature and the plant world into her drawings, often in relation to parts of human anatomy.

Since then she has published other artist books, such as Lieber Geld (Rather/Dear Money), published in 2014, which the journalist Anna Brenken described as "a mosaic that is as curious as it is poetic".

In it, Choi-ahoi proves her "invaluable talent for discovering the great world theater in a small form in everyday life".

From 2015 to 2019 she was a professor for drawing at the University of the Arts Bremen and has been a professor for drawing at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin since 2019.

She lives in Hamburg and Berlin.

In 2015 she accepted a professorship for drawing at the University of the Arts Bremen in the master studio of the School of Visual Combinations, which artistically combines the fields of typography, drawing, editorial design and publishing.

She is married to a former fellow student from her years at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, the Greek painter Nikos Valsamakis.

She lives in Hamburg and Berlin.

Kyung-hwa Choi-ahoi's work combines the elements of drawing and recording to create an art form of its own.

"From an early age, she combined drawings with poetic journaling—a practice she has continued to this day", wrote the German art historian Belinda Grace Gardner.

"The diary drawings that have become her trademark have been emerging since the first semester, when she began to produce drawings on five to ten A4 sheets of paper every day."