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CHO DUCK-HYUN

Conceptual Framework: Artwork

Memories of the 20th century (1997)
Mixed media installation with photographs, fabric, boxes and lights
Dimensions variable

The artwork can change according to the particular gallery site in which it is set. It usually consists of an installation of boxes in which there are drawings in charcoal and conté on canvas, sometimes with glass and often with lights on each individual image.

Conceptual Framework: Artist

Cho Duck-Hyun (born 1957) is a professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Hansung University in Seoul. He is one of Korea’s leading contemporary installation artists. His artmaking fits within both the Cultural and Postmodern frames. His role as an artist is to address the profound social, political and economic changes that the Korean people have experienced during the 20th Century. He investigates the disjunctions that he perceives in contemporary Korea, a nation that increasingly sheds tradition as it embraces progress.

Conceptual Framework: World

Cho Duck-Hyun inhabits a world in which traditional values are being rapidly supplanted by western, industrial values and this is reflected in his artmaking. He is part of a generation of younger Koreans who have inherited a painful legacy of political struggle and division while experiencing rapid and tumultuous change throughout their society. His artworks have been widely exhibited throughout Asia as well as Europe and the USA.

Artmaking Practice: Actions

Cho Duck-Hyun collects vintage photographs from various sources, including his own family album. Cho alters the scale of each photo, often to life-size proportions, and recreates it on canvas. He renders each photograph by hand and these exquisitely detailed figurative drawings are done using charcoal and conté crayon making the image once again unique.
The drawings are then framed by shallow, black, box-like structures. Each box is set up in relation to the others in the installation so that it represents a particular point of view and faces another image, which is seen by the artist as an opposite in some way. An image of an elderly man faces the image of two young girls, the perennial dichotomy between youth and age.

Often the folds of fabric worn by the figures in the drawings become real fabric that flow from the canvas and across the floor in a long swathe. This transformation of the drawn object into the real is a device used by the artist to pull the image out into the same realm as that of the audience. He wants to link the past of the image with the present of the audience. This connection is further dramatised by the use of unconventional lighting techniques. Each image of a figure has its own light on a stand that pulsates, alternately glowing and slowly diminishing, as the artist sees it, suggesting the flux of human memory itself.

Artmaking Practice: Ideas

Cho Duck-Hyun’s installation contains ideas based on the historical events that have shaped the Korean people: the colonisation of Korea by Japan, WWII, the Korean War, post war recovery, the industrial and technical revolutions , and the changing status and contribution of women to Korean society. He also uses images from his own family history and genealogy as symbols for historic events. He places his images and ideas in boxes to suggest and reveal unknown aspects of his nation’s history as if opening old trunks.

Through these symbolic images and their arrangement in the gallery, Cho addresses the nature of conflict and division – ideological, generational, cultural, ethnic and gender-based, and the possibility of reconciliation and balance in the near future.

Conceptual Framework: Audience
Frames: Cultural/Postmodern

Cho interrogates the Korean sense of both national and personal identity in his installations embodying the sense of irony and paradox inherent in the modern Korean psyche with an ironic use of both contemporary and traditional Korean approaches to artmaking. On the one hand he is conceptual in the way he forms his ideas. He chooses to use the western form of installation and the postmodern device of appropriating and recontextualising images he has borrowed, in this case, old photographs. On the other hand he pays tribute to the traditional by his meticulous hand rendering of these images, which mirror the exquisite aspects of traditional Korean art aesthetics and the quietly contemplative mood he creates is reminiscent of traditional Korean religious and philosophical practice.

The artist expects his audience to stop and contemplate his work, not only the mastery of technique, but to think about the ideas he presents as well.