Andrew Ooi: In Dialogue with Paper
September 17 — October 19, 2025
Tuesday — Saturday, 12—5 PM
Curated by Vinny Yang
Opening Reception
Sat, Sept 27, 2:30PM — 4:30PM
Toronto-based artist Andrew Ooi is known for his intricate sculptures made from countless hand-folded and painted sheets of paper. Working with repetition and precision, he builds geometric grids and patterned fields that shift with light and perspective, turning paper into complex visual and meditative experiences. Over the past decade, his practice has drawn especially on Japanese gampi paper—thin, lightweight, and remarkably strong—whose resilience has enabled him to push the limits of folding, painting, and structure. This exhibition, a concentrated retrospective, brings together highlights from these years, tracing Ooi’s exploration of form, pattern, and transformation.
This exhibition also marks a threshold, introducing Ooi’s most recent works that signal a new chapter in his evolving practice. Earlier, his works were made from the finer sort of paper, such as Japanese gampi, but now they have shifted to found papers and, in turn, other found materials. Paper is available almost anywhere, in any form, all over, and always opening his practice to different possibilities. This openness also connects Ooi’s practice to a larger conversation in contemporary art about the everyday. As Maurice Blanchot reminds us in his 1962 essay Everyday Speech, “the everyday is the most difficult to discover,” —not because it is hidden, but because it is always too close, too ordinary, too easily overlooked. For Blanchot, the everyday resists capture: it is repetitive, anonymous, and seemingly insignificant, yet it is precisely in that insignificance that the possibility of meaning resides. This paradox has been central to contemporary art since the 1960s, from conceptual practices that elevated routine actions to installations that make us rethink the overlooked materials of daily existence. Ooi’s recent works enter this conversation, transforming the discarded and familiar into structures that carry memory, routine, and imagination. They remind us that in 2025, what seems most fragile and repetitive—the daily, the overlooked—may hold the quiet force to transform how we see and how we live.
— Vinny Yang
About Artist
Andrew Ooi (pronounced “o͞oē”) is a self-taught, Canadian visual artist. His principal medium is paper, which he manipulates to create abstract, geometric artworks examining ideas about art history, anthropology, identity, and human behavior. His work has been exhibited across Canada and the US and awarded multiple grants from the Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils. As his interest in materials becomes more conceptual, his practice has evolved toward installation and participatory art.
