Suelyn Choo is an emerging, multifaceted Trinidadian artist and organizer. After receiving a scholarship in Art and Design from the Government of her country, she completed a BSc in Biochemistry with a minor in Women's Studies from the University of Delaware in 2017. After returning to Trinidad, she helped facilitate a collaborative mural project that foregrounded the fight against gender-based violence. Balancing a career at the Ministry of Health with compelling creative projects, she co-founded Acute An9le (@acutean9le) in 2018, which saw her directing and styling photoshoots for sharp new talent and veteran designers alike, such as IDLEWOODbespoke and Meiling Inc. Through Acute An9le, she explored the intersection of her Chinese and Indian heritages through the ornamentation of the body, which sparked an interest in presentation and perception of the self in private and public spaces. She seeks to answer these questions through work which includes self-taught painting, photography, makeup, fashion, and dance.
In 2020, she showcased figure drawings in a group show at Alice Yard and collaborated with producer and DJ Blasé Vanguard on a performance, Red Envelope, that explored music, movement and fashion. In 2021, she exhibited paintings in a group show Relative and collaborated on a performance piece instigated by noted artist Chris Cozier, that was shown at the IDB Healing a Broken World virtual summit. She showcased her performance piece, Paria’s Pearl, which explores her relationship with her Chinese family’s migration and assimilation. It was performed and screened at documenta fifteen, facilitated by Alice Yard, in tandem at Granderson Lab, Trinidad and Kassel, Germany in July 2022. In 2023, it was screened at the Caribbean Tales Film Festival (CTFF) in Toronto, Canada; trinidad + tobago film festival (TTFF) in Port of Spain, Trinidad and was exhibited in a group show Keep in Touch at Host Gallery in London. That same year, she graduated from the University of the West Indies, Mona with a Diploma in Psychology and exhibited paintings in a group show Contemporary Vernacular at Olympia Mini Gallery. Currently, she is an artist in resident at NLS in Kingston, Jamaica.

Artist Statement
Whether through painting, photography, makeup, fashion or dance, my work explores the presentation of the self in private and public spaces. My art is one of testimony, witness and lived experience. All my work — whether my painting practice, performance, bodily ornamentation, creative direction and styling — transforms private, intimate conversations I have with my subconscious into public display. I am invested in the interplay between solitude and the social; the performance and mirroring that occurs when you share a space with others, leaving the private to enter the public, leaving the public to return to the private. I am interested in the ways the public intrudes, corrodes and impacts the private self. My work argues that once you've interacted with others, you can never be the same. For example, my painting Yuh watching the mirror or yuh watching yuh self I'm challenging the purpose of the seemingly ordinary act of getting ready to present ourselves publicly. I'm asking whether makeup is a conciliatory mask, the revelation of the core of oneself, or something else entirely — a suspension within this moment of dressing and undressing, a liminal space where the truth of human behaviour is revealed. Exploring these transient states, of being but not fully whole, like adornment, reflections, shadows, emotions or spectres. My work aims to capture or document the ephemeral, to bear witness and share them.