Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Cho Hyo Ri was represented by solo exhibitions including 《Horizontal Cocktail》 (OCI Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Extended Play》 (Gallery ANOV, Seoul, 2021), and 《Your Clock is BEHIND / Your Clock is AHEAD》 (Gallery N/A, Seoul, 2020).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Cho’s work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Hysteria: Contemporary Realism Painting》 (Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023), 《Window Reconstruction》 (Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2023), 《Rales, Wheezes and Crackles》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2022), 《Usefulness – User Friendly》 (Eulji Art Center, Seoul, 2022), 《The Seasons》 (ThisWeekendRoom, Seoul, 2022), and 《Gongjungchelyeon(Air Practice)》 (LaLa &, Seoul, 2019).

Awards (Selected)

In 2023, Cho Hyo Ri was selected as one of the ‘2024 OCI YOUNG CREATIVES’ and was recognized as one of the ten emerging artists to watch at Frieze Seoul 2024.

Originality & Identity

From the outset, Cho Hyo Ri’s work has deconstructed dichotomous structures such as reality versus virtuality, material versus illusion, flatness versus space, exploring the boundary zones where these opposing dimensions intersect. In her first solo exhibition 《Your Clock is BEHIND / Your Clock is AHEAD》(Gallery N/A, 2020), the work Behind/Ahead(2020) appropriates a time error message to depict an irregular space-time entangled with past, present, and future within the frame of painting, clearly revealing this critical perspective.

The concept of time explored by the artist has since expanded to encompass personal experiences and emotional layers. In 《Extended Play》(Gallery ANOV, 2021), works such as I was there(2021) metaphorically transform fragments of reality, individual psychology, and a sense of helplessness within uncontrollable daily life into a visual language, allowing concrete life narratives to permeate the work.

This intersection of time and space evolves more three-dimensionally after the two-person exhibition 《The Seasons》(ThisWeekendRoom, 2022) with artist Yiji Jeong. Particularly in Overture(2022), which overlays the illusion of virtual space onto the actual architecture of the exhibition, her conceptual focus visibly transitions toward space and structure.

In the same exhibition, works such as Come away with me(2022) and It’s raining, Mr. Judd(2022) also demonstrate the artist's intention to transcend the flatness of traditional painting, extending her concepts into the realm of physical space. In her solo exhibition 《Horizontal Cocktail》(OCI Museum of Art, 2024), visualizations of liquid circulation, gravity, and evaporation embody a non-linear concept of time. This constructs a unique visual philosophy where past, present, and future do not exist separately but overlap simultaneously. The artist’s growing interest in transparency, nature, and light—evident in works like The Boy Who Swallowed a Star_2(2024) and Gravity(2024)—further deepens her exploration of the perceptual boundaries between illusion and reality.

Style & Contents

Cho Hyo Ri’s formal experimentation began by dismantling and expanding the structure of flat painting. Through the use of 3D simulations, she introduces the notion of “front” and “back” onto the surface, blending diverse materials such as paper, acrylic, and oil on canvas to generate illusion and depth. By incorporating embossed watermarks and architecturally utilizing the exhibition space itself, she disrupts conventional image consumption and destabilizes the boundaries of perception.

Since 2022, her experiments with flatness and dimensionality have expanded beyond the pictorial frame to occupy the exhibition space as installations. During this period, she incorporated industrial materials such as stainless steel, acrylic, and resin to convert the visual illusions of painting into spatial sculptures, utilizing elements like droplets and reflective surfaces to rematerialize immateriality in her sculptural language.

In her latest solo exhibition 《Horizontal Cocktail》(2024), virtual simulations and physical exhibition spaces are organically integrated. Works such as Cocktail to Go(2024) and Sunglass and Mask(2024) depict the viewpoint from inside a moving vehicle and the landscape reflected on sunglasses, respectively, overturning the boundaries between reality and illusion while activating time’s fluidity and cyclical structure. In Gravity(2024), environmental settings from a 3D virtual world—gravity, wind direction, and lighting—are reflected in the painting to sensorially visualize the multi-dimensional transformations of time and space through liquid imagery.

Topography & Continuity

Cho Hyo Ri has consistently problematized the flatness of painting and the boundaries of visual illusion, securing an experimental position within contemporary art as a practitioner of “meta-painting.” Since her debut solo exhibition in 2020, she has continuously dissolved the boundaries of reality-virtuality, material-immateriality, and time-space by organically integrating flatness, dimensionality, spatial structure, and digital simulation.
She has developed a formal language that connects the “front” and “back” of the pictorial surface with the viewer’s movement since her early works, and more recently, she has expanded this painterly concept to encompass the entire architectural structure of the exhibition space, integrating physical space itself as an active part of her work.

Through devices such as “watermarks,” “reflective materials,” and “transparent surfaces,” she subverts conventional image consumption, transforms the linearity of time into cyclical and non-linear structures, and proposes new perceptual layers. Notably, her recent simulation-based works actively absorb scientific and digital technologies as creative tools, evolving toward the dissolution of painting’s material limitations.

Selected as one of the ‘2024 OCI YOUNG CREATIVES’ and recognized among the ten emerging artists to watch at Frieze Seoul 2024, Cho is positioned to further lead the conceptual and technological expansion of contemporary painting. Moving forward, she is expected to actively construct new visual geographies that interconnect physical and digital realms, expanding the possibilities of painting on a global stage.