Sophia Chai likens her practice in photography to a retracing of the medium to its mother origins, as a natural phenomenon of light and space. She reimagines the feeling of encountering a day’s beginning: sunlight permeating through the mouth of a cave. Each time she makes a photograph in her studio, she returns to that cave - a camera obscura, a darkened room, a womb.

Her inquiry into optics began in 2001 during graduate school, when she transformed her studio into a camera obscura. She also draws inspiration from Mohist scholars (named for the ancient Chinese Scholar Mo-Ti (470-391 BC), whose writings linked the optics of concave and convex mirrors with ethics.

Working within the rectangular room of her studio, Chai uses simple materials (masking tape, graphite, and paint) alongside an analog view camera to construct abstract compositions that mimic minimalist drawings or paintings. Upon closer inspection do the shadows of three-dimensional space emerge: a phenomenological mirage born of simple means.

Her recent work returns to childhood memories of learning Hangul, the Korean alphabet. In Mouth-Space (2022-), Chai maps the spatial logic of Korean vowel characters onto her studio corner, with the vowel forms serving as generative constraints in exploring felt seeing.

Stripping the language of abstraction and photography down to their barest elements, Chai transforms her studio corner as a conceptual stand-in for the camera’s interior or the mouth’s inside. In each photograph, a collapsing and reassembling of space unfolds. What they project emerges from an intuitive impulse, an internal gestation.

Chai’work has been widely exhibited at sites including Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Luhring Augustine, A.I.R. Gallery, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Knockdown Center, Marinaro Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Hyde Park Art Center, among many others. Solo exhibitions include 106 Green Gallery (Brooklyn, NY, 2016), Rochester Art Center (MN, 2020), Hair+Nails Gallery (Minneapolis, 2020 & 2023), and Light Work (Syracuse, NY, 2024). She presented her third solo exhibition with Hair+Nails Gallery in NYC in fall of 2025.

Chai is the recipient of the 2024/25 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship. Her work has received support from the Jerome Foundation (2019-2020), Minnesota State Arts Board (2020, 2022, 2023, 2025), Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council (2019), and The First Ten (2024-25), a national initiative supporting mid-career artist mothers. Recent press includes Artforum, MUSEÉ Magazine, and Document Journal. In 2024, she completed her first permanent outdoor public project, commissioned by the City of Rochester and Destination Medical Center. Chai holds a BA in chemistry from the University of Chicago and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is represented by Hair+Nails Gallery (Minneapolis, NYC) and is based in Rochester, MN.