26 Apr Hyunjoo Cho
Hyunjoo’s work is usually a reaction to her surrounding ambience, mostly by taking photos from an extremely subjective point of view. She likes to understand places by observing the objects dwelling in them, their fragile relationship with the environment. Sometimes she expands these observations into experiments, and records them in photographic images using cameras and scanners.
In Blanca, she decided to install tracing papers around Centro Negra pressed with edged stones, and waited several days until the winds pushed the papers against the stones and left marks. Then she scanned these papers to turn the marks into abstract images. To her, they look like scars.
One of the first things she noticed after arriving in Centro Negra was that it was extremely windy. For the first two weeks of her residency, there were strong gusts every day, strong enough to swing open wooden doors in the apartments, which would make faint scratches on the dusty floor. It was interesting to see something so transient and invisible as the winds making physical interactions with concrete things. This became her inspiration to start the paper experiment, the will to capture these subtle interactions.
She made one of the installations in her balcony, so she could hear the paper flap in the wind all night. Some moments, when the winds were especially strong, it felt as if she was torturing the paper. After several nights, she decided to stop the experiment. The winds were calming down. The faces of paper were scratched and creased.
Although initially the experiments seem to be about the reaction of materials, gaining abstract patterns, transferring the ephemeral into something permanent. There is also a straight relationship with her personal experience and emotional landscape.
The marks left on the papers are analog to life traces in our unconsciousness.
This residency was funded by the Ikuo Hirayama Scholarship, awarded by the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts.
