JAIYOUNG CHO

BODY & BODIES

OPENING 02.03.24, 4 — 7PM

ON VIEW UNTIL 03.02.24

CARVALHO PARK announces the inaugural United States exhibition of Korean artist, Jaiyoung Cho, with the opening of her solo exhibition Body & Bodies. The show comprises an expansive sculpture installation, formerly presented by the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul, surrounded by her latest series of paper and metal wall sculptures. The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by So-La Jung, Curatorial Director, Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA). Body & Bodies will open on Saturday, February 3, in the gallery’s newly expanded exhibition space at 110 Waterbury Street in Brooklyn, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of CARVALHO PARK.

Cho sets her stage with an assembly of standing, geometrically shaped metal structures – the human body distilled – each affixed with a kaleidoscopically facetted, paper sculpture. Figural in scale, these meticulously crafted, polyhedral components carry associations of heads and limbs, proliferated and sequenced after our own chemical structures. Here materiality inherently mirrors the human condition, paper and metal echoing fragility and strength. Cho invites her audience to circle the installation, and in doing so, the ‘bodies’ enter a state of flux; they fracture and overlap in a process of replication and transformation. The surrounding environment thus enters the work, and the alignments that form – as space, viewer, and the individual and collective ‘body’ entwine – refute concepts of isolation, while also piercing hierarchical convictions of humans as the universal center.  

LANDSCAPE OF A DISCONTINUOUS NETWORK

Ph.D. So-La Jung, Curatorial Director, Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA)

“...which are themselves not flat beings but beings in depth, inaccessible to a subject that would survey them from above, open to him alone that, if it be possible, would coexist with them in the same world.”   - 『 The visible and the invisible 』, M. Merleau-Ponty -

Upon entering the gallery, you are greeted with a multi-colored sculptural installation that is neither abstract nor representational, but rather a combination of discontinuous lines and surfaces. The magenta, blue, green colors on the unidentifiable shapes do not stand for any specific ideas; they merely act as elements that ‘separate’ or ‘connect’ the shapes. The colors in conjunction with the shapes seem to state that the installation is neither a grouping of individual forms nor a singular uniform object. If this is the case, what do these discontinuous shapes reveal to us? This is the question posed by Jaiyoung Cho in her exhibition, Body & Bodies.

The word ‘independent’ is used to describe a state in which you are not subordinate to or dependent upon anything, but it is difficult to imagine a state in which someone exists outside of any and all influences. Perhaps the word ‘intertwine’ better describes the state of human existence in the post-postmodernist world we live in. Interest in the connection between object, human self, and the other, has existed for a long time. This question, in essence, derives from a basic interest in human existence itself. How can we understand ourselves and the objects, the others, the world we perceive, and the invisible connections between them? The French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty found the answer in the ‘physical.’ Merleau-Ponty proposed that the self only exists in the environment through the ‘physical.’ In his view, nothing exists in a completely disconnected, objective state; the self is always involved, connected, and therefore deeply imputed to the world.

For the works featured in this exhibition, Cho removes their individuality and presents them as objects within their environment. Perhaps the artist has accepted our existence as mutually subjective beings. The physical is an important factor in this manner of existence, which is why Cho also focuses on it. We have long understood that the world is cohabited by the physical and the spiritual, and arguments for the connection between these entities as transcending rationalism, has been made repeatedly by postmodernist philosophers. Perceiving physical objects that have clear physical boundaries as mutually subjective, interconnected beings, is not an intuitive task. Cho’s emptied-out lines and shapes, which mix and intertwine with the space beyond it, materialize this rather complex concept of ‘mutual subjectivity’ – meaning, my subjectivity develops in mutual relation to the others’ subjectivities, which in turn must mean that the different selves are deeply interconnected with each other. Philosophers like Merleau-Ponty attribute this connection to the ‘physical’. The physicality which acts as a stage and medium for the permeation of the other and me is lucidly represented in Cho’s central installation in Body & Bodies.

This exhibition embodies Cho’s recurring subject matter which emphasizes the relationship between the physical and the self. Delving deeper into this subject, Cho’s work deals with the ‘connections’ that continuously influence one another. Cho’s installations are therefore closer to an aesthetic representation of the concept that the human is always connected to the other, or that the individual is always intertwined with a much larger system. To visually solve this subject, Cho employs an aesthetic solution where the space behind the work invades the negative space of the composition – the  obscurity or imperfection comes from the dislocation of the lines and shapes.

In Cho’s previous work, as seen in the ‘Monster’ or ‘Sculptural Skin’ series, the fundamental elements are her polyhedral geometric shapes and the material paper, easily manipulated and fragile. These substantial characteristics suggest the ideas anchoring Cho’s work. The geometric shapes, created using numbers, rule out all language-based thinking and understanding; it resembles Husserls’ term, epoché, as an object that is experienced without pre-conception. At the same time, these shapes further resemble the conditions of human existence where creation and extinction co-exist. The polyhedral shapes made from non-identical surfaces recall growth processes of living organisms, perhaps due to the artist’s organic process of drawing, cutting, and gluing the paper surfaces together.

Cho’s artistic perspective has led her work away from anthropocentricism and towards an ecological perspective. Detaching her work from ideas of hierarchy and the distinction between the center and the rest, Cho studies humanities and mythology to restructure her lens of the world she inhabits. From the autonomous polyhedral works of fragile materials, Cho has moved from the self to the entanglement between objects and the other, studying the physical which makes it all possible.

Jaiyoung Cho (b. 1979, South Korea) is a sculptor and installation artist living and working in Seoul. She received her BFA and MFA in Sculpture, from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea, and conducted an MA in Fine Art, from the Utretcht School of Arts, in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Significant solo exhibitions include those held at Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul; Krognoshuset, Lund, Sweden; CARVALHO PARK, New York; Paradise Zip, Seoul; Gallery KunstDoc, Seoul; and Songeun Gallery, Seoul. Cho’s work has been featured in notable group exhibitions at Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul; Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul; Embassy of the Republic of Korea, Berlin; Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi; Museum SAN, Wonju; Blume Museum of Contemporary Art, Paju; Daegu Art Museum, Daegu; Atelier Hermès, Seoul; and Doosan Gallery, Seoul. She is the recipient of artist grants from the Fund for Korean Art Abroad, Seoul; Seoul Foundation for Arts & Culture; Paradise Culture Foundation, Seoul; Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul; KunstDoc, Seoul; Seoul Museum of Art; and Songeun Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul.