Water on the move, from dripping taps to the heaving waters of the sea. As we have come to expect of him, Seoungho Cho the artist has once more wielded his video camera like a true scientist. Where his earlier, single channel video 'Salt Creek' (1998) was a study of the earth in intimate close-up, this time he conducts a thorough exploration of another of the four elements composing the material world. In this work he investigates the 'wet' element in its various forms and manifestations. We are of course all familiar with water in its purified form as the drinking water that flows from our domestic taps. Cho begins by filming one of these familiar jets of water in close-up. We get the feeling that the artist then goes on to ask himself where this water comes from, and what water actually is. When you watch a kitchen tap drip you don't immediately think of water's anarchy, its elemental power and enormous motions. Cho, however, is looking for precisely this link, and he bears the viewer off with him on his enquiry concerning that strange thing called water. We see and hear water: trickling, falling, flowing, forming itself into waves, and we are struck by its constant metamorphoses and natural mobility. Sounds plays a large part in the process. Cho's recording picks up the sound of tiny falling droplets as readily as the overwhelming crack when water is struck with the flat of the hand. He films the silence of a smooth, glassy surface of water, as well as the deafening tumult of a surging sea. In a technically adept combination of sound and image he shows us waters large and small. About 'Linear Tracking' , Cho's latest work, that was still in the final stages of editing as this catalogue went to press, he himself says: "I saw the people on the street. I saw them walking and their reflection. In this work, I try to express the vacillation between what I see and what I imagine, or the fine line between perception and illusion. I try to explore these different realms through the eye of a camera and to express this synchro-existence and the vacillation between these realms through visual illusion and paradox. My eyes came to see the mirage in the city". Cho's works are often formalistic, almost painterly voyages of discovery. We might call them poetically dynamic, characterized for the most part by a flow of unsubstantial, fleeting images. New objects of study are constantly broached, new atmospheres constructed. Cho has the knack of involving the viewer in his penetrating observations.
– Marieke van Hal |
Cold Pieces
Production: Nansik Kim
Linear Tracking
Sound: Tracy Leipold, Stephen Vitiello
Seoungho Cho, 1957, Seoul (South Korea)
Lives and works in New York (USA)
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