Kate (Junehyo) Choi is a 17-year-old eleventh grader attending Asheville School in North Carolina. Her hobbies include listening to music, watching movies, and reading books. She is currently preparing her portfolio for university.

1) How long have you been studying art? And what drew you to art?

2) Was there an inspiration for Ring Ring?

3) What Mediums do you enjoy working with?

4) Is there an artist that inspires you? What is your inspiration?

5) Over the coming years, what kind of artistic goals do you have?

Art has been my hobby since elementary school, but I began to take art seriously in 9th grade. I was first drawn to art by comic books. I just loved how the collaboration of words and images could bring out so many magical worlds. Then I started to create them for myself. I would build these fantasies and play within the worlds I had created. These experiences made me want to explore other types of art, starting an endless exploration. I discovered how it gave me joy without any cost and encouraged me always to be genuine.

Ring Ring began with an accident. I spilled coffee on one of my favorite books, causing incredible frustration. But when I looked back on that book a week later, it looked like a beautiful flower. With this inspiration, I created Ring Ring using coffee to represent all my past accidents and mistakes. I like to think that the coffee-stained girl in the picture is calling the future Kate Choi, worrying about her mistakes and telling her, “Everything will be alright.”

Ink is my favorite medium because of the balance between control and unruliness. It allows happy mistakes while leaving with the authority to control the direction of the picture.

Egon Schiele is the artist that inspires me. His distortion of the human body and unconventional perspectives inspire me to look at the world in a new way. I also love how his self-portraits and figurative works show the bare truth of human nature.

My biggest artistic goal is to work on a canvas twice my height. Sometimes, I hesitate about an idea before I start, and that idea loses its vibrancy by the time I decide to put it on paper. I want to work on an enormous canvas and draw my ideas without hesitation.