Andrew Ooi: In Dialogue with Paper
September 17 — October 19, 2025
Tuesday — Saturday, 12—5 PM
Opening Reception
Sat, Sept 27, 2:30PM — 4:30PM
Curated by Vinny Yang
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 extensively drawn on Japanese gampi paper—thin, lightweight, and resilient—which has enabled him to push the limits of folding, painting, and structure. This exhibition, a retrospective of select artworks from these years, traces Ooi’s ongoing exploration of form, pattern, and transformation. Additionally, the exhibition marks a threshold: introducing some of Ooi’s most recent works signalling a new chapter in his evolving practice.
As paper is available nearly anywhere, Ooi has begun to explore the medium in all its forms and applications. Consequently, different papers - including mass-produced, pulped (or pre-formed), packaging and found - are now also part of the larger dialogue Ooi takes up of paper as an artist material, its role in the history of art and how art, including Contemporary Art, consists of 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 remark on 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.
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. These works have exhibited at art galleries and fairs in Canada and the US (including Toronto, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Miami); published in various media (Young Space, Artoronto.ca, Uppercase); and awarded multiple grants (Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils). However, as his interest in materials and applications becomes varied and conceptual, his practice has evolved toward installation and participatory art, exploring unconventional presentation and partnerships.
About Curator
Vinny Yixiao Yang (she/her) is a Toronto-based curator and researcher in contemporary art. She holds a BA in Fine Art Photography from the University of the Arts London, and an MA in Art History from the University of Toronto where she was awarded the Paula Bonato Memorial Award for academic achievement. Her research focuses on photography, digital media, and the politics of image-making, with particular attention to how visual culture is shaped by absence, mediation, and labour.
