Sohee CHO, Savina Museum of Contemporary Art
Birth
1971, Seoul
Genre
Installation, Media, Performance
Homepage
About the non-visible area of delicate objects_curated by Kang Jae-Hyun
Sohee CHO has been working with drawing, installation, and media using delicate and transparent objects. She presents labor-intensive installations made of something in everyday use and thin, meltable, translucent or transparent: a toilet paper, thread, a pencil, a candle, and light. The exhibition consists of her representative works of art that shows her painstaking effort toward art. Sohee CHO has been using ‘thread’ as a main material of her work. Using the thread(or pencil), she fills a space by knitting(or drawing a line) which is a trifling, simple, and repetitive act. One string is too thin and easily breaks but its flexible quality changes its form as she leads. At some point, the numberless thread lines become the net, smoke, and light occupying the space. In her another work, she has recorded her life with nothing missed by typing some words on the toilet paper and re-rolling it everyday. Her diverse acts of recording her time eventually show her practical attitude in order to reach closer to essentials; her reflective attitude makes the audiences also reflect on themselves.
A work titled ‘Bongsunhwa Prayer’ is a project started to commemorate the Sewol Ferry disaster occurred in April 26, 2014. To remember the tragic disaster killed 304 people, Sohee CHO had 304 people dye their fingers with garden balsam(Bongsunhwa in Korean) and pray joining their hands and photographed them. The photographs fills the entire space in a form of a small house. The hands dyed with blood red pointing the sky are so small and weak but filled with strong desires for that it will never happen again. And finally CHO’s work and participants’ wish become one in the red space. Her working method is like the asceticism of silence. Her slow and repetitive performance which seems humble and trivial puts the flow of layers of time into the space and multiplies the energy. The fragile objects that she chose as a medium seem to represent herself as well as human weakness. And although they look delicate and trivial, they make viewers think about the essence of the existence of humans or objects.
