Cho Ho Young, Moving Walk, 2023, Mixed media, Dimensions variable ©Cho Ho Young

The “phenomenon” that appears before our eyes refers to what is perceived—that is, an object that has entered consciousness. It is not an object that exists independently and is confronted by the self, but rather an object perceived by the self, in other words, an idea. Embedded within this process is a clear tendency of humans to orient themselves toward certain things in order to preserve their sensory nature.

Such individual structures do not allow us to understand or see either ourselves or the world “as it is,” but instead lead us to accept what consciousness has already composed and manipulated in advance. Cho Ho Young seeks the essence of existence within this world constructed by sensory perceptual systems.

This attempt unfolds particularly from an epistemological perspective, taking the form of inductive reasoning through the observation of experience. In this process, the body functions as a crucial element in conducting experimental practices of observation. Cho Ho Young’s solo exhibition 《Stereoscope》 searches for a decisive moment in which cognitive experience is expanded into a more three-dimensional form, building upon feedback received from participants in her previous solo exhibition 《The Nth Ringing of the Bell》(Space Hwam, 2022), which presented learned behavioral patterns in an experimental format.

The exhibition title “Stereoscope” refers to a device that creates depth by juxtaposing and combining two images. Comparable to contemporary 3D images, the stereoscope works by presenting two photographs taken from slightly different angles to each eye, causing binocular disparity that produces an illusion of depth closer to reality.

French novelist and critic André Maurois once explained Marcel Proust’s recollection—triggered by tasting a piece of madeleine soaked in tea in In Search of Lost Time—using the example of a stereoscope. In this sense, memory generates a “temporal stereoscopic image” that brings together two different moments—past and present—through the same sensation.

What, then, is Cho Ho Young’s stereoscope? It can be understood as the artist’s “cognitive stereoscopic image,” which captures contradictions within an object through observation and grants them depth via a third perspective: an embodied cognitive system grounded in the body.

Cho Ho Young, A Patch of Ground: Fragmented Ground, 2023, 500 Rubber balls, acrylic panel, Dimensions variable ©Post Territory Ujeongguk

What Cho Ho Young focuses on in this exhibition is not the content of experience, but its structure. To this end, she dismantles the objects of everyday experience and their associated actions, subtly twisting them to stage a kind of theatrical apparatus. Light, sound, and materials—used to search for the fundamental form of objects—guide the movements of viewers.

Acting like prisms, the work’s devices assist in understanding the essence of objects from multiple angles, dispersing established modes of perception into layers of varying wavelengths. When the body fully senses such an apparatus environment, deeply ingrained habitual behaviors and inertial movements are summoned, and moments of awareness emerge through experiences that differ from expectation.

At the precise moment when an unfamiliar sensation toward an object is detected, it is as though the previously closed opposite eye opens, and the object’s stereoscopic relief slowly comes into view.

Ultimately, the essence the artist seeks is discovered through this process of sensory reorganization. In other words, the object is experienced only along the path of tuning the frequency of temporal gaps that arise between new perceptual experiences—formed by questioning and doubting habitual sensory inertia, assumptions, and the certainty of preconceived representations.

The unfamiliar sensation of taking a first step, followed by another and another, evokes a paradoxically familiar yet strange feeling. Through this, Cho Ho Young’s work not only realizes fleeting moments in which objects are revealed in their raw state—without the aid of front/back or up/down orientations—but also reawakens our own bodies and movements, entangled as they are within ideas and reality, illusion and presence, knowledge and experience.

 
Shin Jiwon (Independent Curator)

References