Bad at Sports Episode 962: Sophia Chai

This week Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with artist Sophia Chai at the Door County Contemporary Art Fair to discuss photography that insists on becoming something else. Working between painting, sculpture, installation, and large-format analog photography, Chai creates images that challenge our assumptions about perspective, representation, and the mechanics of seeing itself. 

The conversation moves from camera obscuras and four-by-five view cameras to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, cave painting, Korean language, immigration, and the colonial language embedded within photographic practice. Chai reflects on transforming her graduate studio into a walk-in camera obscura after September 11th, collaborating with architectural space rather than simply depicting it, and asks whether photography might become a practice of witnessing rather than capturing.

Name Drops & Links

• Sophia Chai – https://www.sophiachai.com

• Hair + Nails – https://hairandnailsart.com/

• University of Illinois Chicago School of Art & Art History – https://artandarthistory.uic.edu/

• Kerry James Marshall – https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/kerry-james-marshall

• Judith Kirshner – https://stories.mcachicago.org/speaker/judith-kirshner/

• Plato – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/

• Camera Obscura – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura

• Plato's Allegory of the Cave – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

• Jeff Wall – https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/jeff-wall

• Barbara Kasten – https://barbarakasten.net/

• Johannes Vermeer – https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/artists/johannes-vermeer

• Peter Jackson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jackson

• The Lord of the Rings – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings_(film_series)