Our Overlapping Light (2024)

 

Shin ​Seung Oh (Director of Perigee Gallery)

 

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​Cho Yeonjoo was born and raised in South Korea, studied abroad, and currently lives and works in Scotland. The reason I mention where she is currently based at the outset is because she wants to connect the experiences she gained from where she previously stayed in the past with where she lives at the present time. Her artwork is a study of how the artist can merge the new senses she gains from altered time and space with existing senses and of how this can be visually embodied and expressed. She overlaps these – the past and present – as a single time and space and develops her work on a single surface. Therefore, we should examine the time and space she is talking about.

 

First, let’s talk about space. She says that when she is in Scotland, she thinks of South Korea, and when she stays in South Korea, even for a short while, she ends up thinking of Scotland. In this way, although the geographic distances between Korea and Scotland she thinks of are spatially distinct and separated, in reality, they are perceived as mixed and inseparable sensations contained within her inner self. And the ‘I’ that exists between the physical boundaries cannot lean to one side and so bears this mass of accumulated senses. That is why the artist does not simply assign the previous space to the past and the current space to the present, but thinks of them horizontally, unfolding them. This physical, spatial division can also be understood as temporality. Time progresses as a linear flow of past, present, and future, but in fact, when viewed from the subjective concept of temporality for humans, time remains entangled within ‘me’. Of course, the finite time of humans runs towards death from the moment of birth and there is no way to turn it back. However, humans’ lives continue due to relationships connected by generations called family. In these relationships, the various timeframes of individual members of families overlap. For example, when we are young, we are looked after by adults such as parents, but as time passes, we take care of our parents, which is an intersecting experience in the flow of time. This horizontal and vertical accumulation of time is repeated infinitely, and humans have created their own history in this way. The artist tries to capture the vertical and horizontal time and space in which she is living in her work.

 

Now, let’s talk about her work. The primary material she uses in her work is silk. Materials like silk are woven into a grid with warp and weft threads to form a single fabric. Silk is thin enough to allow light to pass through it, so it can be used on both the front and back simultaneously. The reason she uses this material is probably because of the characteristics of silk, which enable the penetration of light. Because of this, paintings on silk give the impression of floating in the air. So why did the artist get interested in light permeability? She said that she thought a lot about windows, specifically in the space where she stayed. A window has practical purposes: to allow light into the house and to let the inhabitant/s look outside from the inside. However, the artist recognised a window as the thinnest passage and boundary that separates ‘you’ and ‘me’, preventing the inside from being seen or entered from the outside. In this way, depending on the situation, her work puts us in the position of standing in front of a transparent wall like a window. So, in this situation, we could ask, ‘Am I inside? Am I outside? Or do I want to go inside? Do I want to go outside?’ These situations can also cause conflict and concerns arising from one’s own identity and differences from others. However, the silk used by the artist, as in <My Window>, closely adheres to these boundaries, utilising the front and back simultaneously, reversing the top and bottom, and hanging them from invisible wire to blur the distinction itself. Also, as in <Inside and Outside of the Journey>, the inside and outside scenes are placed on the left and right. This work shows that she uses the characteristics of silk and the object of the window as a place to portray her inner landscapes made from her accumulated experiences, which are overlapping, gradually changing and mixing with each other, rather than the conflicting emotions from differences, as mentioned earlier. Yet, she does not always work by limiting herself to the idea of inside and outside. In <Window Underwater: Your Mossy Body Was Warm and Soft>, a landscape where the shadow of a tree cast on the water is erased by a lotus leaf floating on the water, for instance, she also draws what she felt when she met an elderly grandmother. It appears as a landscape containing the emotions of recognising a situation in which they have been placed in different locations due to the flow of time and discovery of the time that has changed each of them in a way they had not previously noticed. In this way, the situation she encounters through the course of her life, and the colourful chain of relationships formed by meeting there and at that time, become a sensory landscape that transcends time and space and is projected onto each other, as we see in her work.

 

Her work, filled with diverse light, appears as scenes that embrace these differences and gaps for the artist. This is not a means to sink into her inner self but to empathise with and connect with others outside. It is well expressed in <Place for Waiting>, a piece seen as separated single panes in a large window. It depicts the scene of the bright and dark colourful sky that we can see as we go about our day. Of course, the images in the painting are based on the artist’s personal experience of looking out of the window of the house in which she lives, but they are everyday images of the sky that change according to the trajectory of light that we each see on a daily basis. In addition to feeling the light of the sky in her landscapes, we find objects that indicate the existence of light, such as the sun, moon, candles, and lamps. In her work, the light that shines equally on everyone living on earth is the most essential phenomenon that connects us no matter whether we recognise it or not. Therefore, to the artist, light is perceived as a medium of connection that fills the gaps of spatial and temporal distances in her work; through a place called art, the artist subtly casts light on people so they can recognise the light that fills the gaps created by difference. If we look at her work in this way, the colours that permeated the silk in her work, or to be precise, a picture plane comprised of colours which fill the gaps between each overlapping thread, is full of light. Therefore, Cho’s method of expression makes the overall atmosphere of the surface look soft and calm, yet it simultaneously looks like a meticulous, compact, thin picture plane.

 

The artist is also attempting to expand the characteristics of light in order to create an installation work that utilises the reflection and transmission of light in space. <Where Our Shadows Meet: I Looked at You Looking at Me> shows glimmering images depending on when and where viewers see the work; the image created by passing through coloured acrylic and holographic film looks like a landscape inside, or just sparkles of light, or a landscape outside rippling like water. In addition, the light reflected on the coloured Perspex and holographic film has a coincidental effect of being projected onto the walls or floor of the exhibition hall, which appears temporarily and then moves and disappears depending on the angle and intensity of the light. Presumably, the effect of light that appears in these various forms must be intended to capture the experience of the intersection of gazes, the overlap of your gaze and mine. However, even if such a device works, it still cannot blur or eliminate the distinction between the outside and the inside. Instead, the artist’s purpose is to create a state of space-time connection that can be shared regardless of which side one is on. In other words, it shows the contrast between the colourful and unfixed liveliness of her installation work and the calm, still, and static appearance of her paintings. It delivers the flow of contrasting sensations the artist feels, the process of being covered, falling off, and being merged again into something new through an in-depth composition.

 

To summarise, to Cho Yeonjoo, the work of painting colourful landscapes of light and reflecting or capturing traces of non-visual light on something is a practical act of overlapping—connecting. Isn’t this a means to continuously experience and capture the time and space in which she has lived, is living, and will live, just like all of us, and to express her attitude and perspective on the world as it is? That is why the artist’s perceptions of the world are not turned towards distant, imaginary things but instead towards realistic landscapes; she depicts them in concrete forms, not abstract images. The reason why her work seems like an unspectacular scene of everyday life probably derives from the artist’s unconscious intention to create a landscape that is naturally permeated with others without revealing differences. The soft and familiar landscape filled with overlapping light is the sum of the artist’s non-verbal and invisible abstract senses, which are experiences that continue to grow. Of course, as I mentioned above, it is based on the experiences of the artist’s personal environment. However, she erupts those experiences outside of herself, giving another sense to viewers in front of her work, thereby continuing to create a new connection. Also, this attitude towards space and time is probably the essence of the work she continuously tries to give us.