SomoS Arts present Unbeobachtet; a solo exhibition by South Korean interdisciplinary artist Jung Soo Cho (1996), featuring paintings, paper collages, as well as a video installation created during her artist residency at SomoS in the winter of 2021/2022, supported by the Arts Council Korea – ARKO.

Layering memories and fleeting impressions in her diary-like artworks, Jung Soo Cho intuitively draws poetics from her intent observations of everyday life, be it scenes from her atelier or her broader explorations of the abundant “non-places” of Berlin that fascinate her.

Cho aims to convey a feeling of “familiar unfamiliarity” in her work, a sense of déjà vu as much personal as collective. Aiming at picturing the overlooked, her art conveys avid perception in any medium she uses. The small daily epiphanies captured and shared by the artist encourage us to engage with our surroundings more intensively.

(Scroll horizontally to view the panorama.)

The artist subverts the conventions of pictorial space by experimenting with discontinuous viewpoints, floating juxtapositions, and the use of negative space, a uniting motif in Unbeobachtet. Its play of presence and absence, foreground and background can be found in her video installation, as well as in her paintings, where the inventive interplay of shapes and their surroundings confounds common visual expectations.

Not just the sense of place is disrupted in Cho’s cosmos; time seems to be as well, with some compositions appearing to present the same scene at different points in time. In her best works, the interplay between experience and memory, perception and representation is captured in striking stills where mundane life is frozen for a moment of rich introspection.
 

The newspaper collages take a more direct approach, incorporating her immediate urban surroundings with remarkable ease and simplicity, evoking the art of Hockney or Cézanne. In the works, the heightened physicality of the loosely applied paper stands in sharp contrast to the illusionistic depictions. The collages show Cho’s capacity to fluctuate interestingly between casual observation and acute expression.
 

The most literal allusion to the running theme of negative space in the show, the soberly titled Presentation 22 video uses newspaper parts leftover from sourcing tones for her collages. It was produced with the PowerPoint application, further aligning it with the show’s preoccupation with the experience of the everyday. Presentation 22 builds upon documentation of live sessions using an overhead projector and various permeable materials, such as mesh and cut newspapers.

The unstable and fragmentary nature of the experience of time and memory are alluded to in the ongoing visual process of layering, removing, and recombining of the materials pictured in the video. Linking the flow and preoccupations of Cho’s creativity during her three months in Berlin to the current events of the daily news, the piece blends the public and the personal. While philosophically suggesting that nothing is fixed, it also invites reflections about the perceived value of art, which, while often initially disregarded, has so much more potential durability than yesterday’s public discourse.
 

Last but not least, this show’s core contribution is a series of mixed media paintings of various sizes, made using acrylic, oil paint, crayons, and industrial marker. Bearing the marks of cutting, erasing, tracing, masking, and stenciling, the delicately-colored canvases carry a sense of vibrant temporality.

Sourced from memory, or personal photographs and iPhone drawings made during her explorations, at first glance they seem not overly engaged in citing art history. On deeper consideration, we may notice subtle references to various art traditions. For instance, Assemblage/Collage (Robert Rauschenberg’s object-focussed art comes to mind), Impressionism (in its general light touch and gestural qualities), Nouveau Réalisme (in its focus on everyday objects, food, and messy tables), and even Situationism (in its connection to whimsical flaneuring and dérive).

Perhaps the most intuitive works in the presentation, the paintings manifest Jung Soo Cho’s unique way of looking. Intimacy, fragility, and transience are all factors that inform the works. As in the floating urban wandering of the dérive, in her paintings, the way seems also to be more important than any definite end goal. We could view them less as purposeful finished creations, but as an index of starts, restarts, detours, followed or abandoned impulses; captured as fickle gestures, quick notations and erasures, that as a whole, portray the beautiful tension involved in making art and the freeing allure of aimlessness.

 

About Jung Soo Cho:

Jung Soo Cho graduated in Fine Arts at Dongguk University in Seoul in 2020. During these studies, she was selected in 2019 for the International Exchange Program at Northern State University, South Dakota, USA. She had her first solo exhibition in 2020, The shape of a Quarter, at Oksang Factory, in Seoul, South Korea; followed by Kitchen/Space, at Space Pado in 2020. Group exhibition participation includes The Tree may be someone we know, at The Lounge Masil at Dongguk University Library, (2019), and Sewoon Portrait, Spaceba421, both in Seoul. In 2018, Jung Soo received the Gold Prize at the 2018 Bangkok Thailand International Intellectual Property Exhibition with Lightning Object in Shapes of Seoul Land Marks (awarded as a team, participated as art director). In 2020, she took part in the virtual exhibition Together Through Painting, organized by London Paint Club. In 2020, The Viewers magazine published the review Expressing Personal Experiences through Art Works – Jung Soo Cho Solo Exhibition.

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Unbeobachtet – Solo exhibition by Korean artist Jung Soo Cho
January 18 – February 5, 2022, Tuesday – Saturday, 14h – 19h
SomoS, Kottbusser Damm 95, 1.0G, 10967 Berlin (U8 – Schönleinstraße)
Visiting: Free entry, 2G applies, no more that 5 visitors allowed at the same time

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Jung Soo Cho’s artist residency at SomoS is kindly supported by the Arts Council Korea – ARKO.

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