Seoungho Cho, Artist in distribution, Korea, 1959
Seoungho Cho was born in 1959 in Pusan, South Korea, and currently lives and works in New York. He received a BA and an MA in graphic arts from Hong-Ik University, Korea, and an MA in video art from New York University. He has had solo exhibitions in many prestigious venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and his videos have been shown in biennales and group screenings throughout Europe and North America. Cho has received various awards and grants, including ones from the Jerome and Rockefeller foundations. Cho uses digital image processing techniques to manipulate simple, everyday objects, scenes or landscapes into highly lyrical sound and image collages. Cho's videos are often very painterly in their use of rich, saturated colour and exquisite composition of the space on the screen. The works sometimes involve subtly developed, open-ended narratives that emphasize the embodied nature of perception and experience. The formal aspects of Cho's videos are closely tied to explorations of how nature is represented through technology, specifically how representation is constituted by traces of contact between bodies, technology and the environment.
Lyrical and visually striking, the video works of Korean artist Seoungho Cho are distinguished by a unique confluence of complex image processing and sound collage. Resonating with a highly metaphorical sensibility, Cho's single-channel tapes and installations are formalist, almost painterly explorations of subjectivity and the subconscious. The urban landscapes that Cho often depicts move with a continuous fluidity, shifting from dreamlike abstractions of light to fleeting reflections of the city. Figures, cars, and trains are mirrored and diffused through one another, silhouetted with a haunting anonymity that is echoed in the poetic texts and soundscapes that accompany each piece. These often tense meditations focus on the nature and cost of isolation and loneliness while integrating into a culture, landscape and language other than one's own.
