The Taiwanese-born artist Y.J. Cho has painted photorealist paintings, almost exclusively of walls, for more than 20 years. She works by taking photos of places that interest her, both in New York, where she has lived since 1976, and other sites to which she has traveled, including Europe, New England, and Indonesia. This show primarily comprised paintings of shadows on on walls photographed by the artist during a recent trip along the Silk Road. Forsaking the grander views of the Gobi Desert and Dunhuang, Cho has focused on a familiar theme: the various marks and indications of passage of time on wall surfaces as well as the intricate beauty of shadows on these facades.

Although Cho has continued to address the same subject in her art, she has changed her style a bit. Her surfaces are more built up, more indicative of activity, and her images now possess abstract interest -- sometimes the shadow patterns in these new works can viewed in non-representational terms, divorced from the objects to which they owe their forms.

9604 (the first of two digits of the title refer to the year 1996, when the painting was done, while the last two refer to the chronological order in which the work was made during that year), for example, consists of the shadow of a manmade structure -- perhaps a roof and support -- against a gray dingy wall. The shadow's geometrical angles frame a triangle of light on the left and luminous parallelogram on the right, so that the painting becomes a study in slanting lines and geometrical planes as much as it is the portrayal of an object's shadow.

The skill shown in Thai and other works demonstrate Cho's long application of a photorealistic style; however, she sees her art as differing form the photorealist tradition because she is more "person" in her approach. Her subjective leanings contrast with what she call the photorealist's "intentional lack of emotion." In the sense that she is most interested in a mood suggesting loss, of an evanescent past, Cho does indeed personalize an intensely impartial approach to image-making, even as she strives to create a picture whose details imitate reality of an exquisite degree.

In the painting 9606 Cho so convincingly renders the shadows of a tree with myriad leaves that the viewer cannot help but admire her technical skill. The rough surfaces of the stucco wall, which serves as the ground for the shadows, is almost palpable, while a living branch on the painting's left side suggests that Cho remains interested in the reality that precedes the image shadowing it. Here the artist moves beyond mimesis to an idealized portrait of nature, based on extreme verisimilitude. Cho's achievement is to describe the real world with such compelling intensity that her compositions achieve more than the sum of their parts.

firstcycle@firstcycle.org | | All pictures and text are © copyrighted 1996-2001 by Min-Yen Kan and the respective artist | Generated on: Tue Oct 1 20:36:20 2002