REVIEW
- Ed McCormack - "A Korean Artist's Highway Songs" (2001)
Although the Beat writer Jack Kerouac and the Pop painter Allen D’Archangelo have both celebrated the mythic American highway in their respective mediums, some of the most vivid evocations of the road have been created by foreign-born artists gazing upon that unique and gaudy wonder with fresh eyes. Witness, for two excellent examples, the neon-splashed highway passages in the Russian emigre novelist Vladimir Nobokov’s “Lolita,” and transplanted British painter David Hockney’s many long and winding California vistas.
No artist in recent memory, however, has captured the metaphysical aspects of the view from behind the wheel from quite as unique a perspective as the Korean born painter Sung Mo Cho, whose solo exhibition can be seen at Pleiades Gallery, 530 West 25 Street, from September 4 to 22.
For one thing, Cho introduces the delicate poetry of the Asian landscape tradition into the equation, letting Eastern aesthetics collide head-on with raw Western banality. Yet his view, while intriguingly skewed, is anything but vulgar.
Working in acrylics or mixed media on canvas, Cho creates compositions in which the road and its natural surroundings take on an unearthly beauty. One of his most impressive paintings in this regard is the acrylic on canvas entitled "Along the Road-Nature," where Cho's take on nature is decidedly surreal. The right side of the composition, meticulous in technique as all of Cho’s paintings are, depicts a seemingly infinite highway weaving between tall rows of trees. But the most amazing element is the sky, where a weird canopy of clouds with inner shadows shaped like myriad craggy peaks in a Chinese landscape scroll looms mysteriously, forming a phenomenal portal of cumuli through which we see a more or less normal stretch of stratosphere. Stylized Asian mountain peaks also appear in a small area on the upper left side of the painting, while a larger area below contains a sideways image of slender winter trees. In a manner that could be termed cinematic, the three sections of the composition, separated by swooping grey borders with a white line down the middle that suggest an aerial view of a highway, appear to transcend time and space. Remarkably, these metaphysical juxtapositions all occur on a canvas not much larger than an Indian miniature, the intimate scale adding to the somewhat disconcerting beauty of the picture.
The use of a symbolic highway as a border to separate disparate images is employed just as effectively in a larger acrylic on canvas called “Along the Road II.” Here, these borders flow between glimpses of graceful, golden autumnal trees; a full moon set like a jewel in a brilliant red sky, and misty blue skyscrapers that loom like some distant Oz.
Of all the paintings in Sung Mo Cho’s “Along the Road” series perhaps the most suggestive and in many ways most intriguing is the square shaped acrylic on canvas entitled “Along the Road-S,” in which the image of a sexy young nude striking a seductive pin-up pose and two mysteriously masked faces appear in the upper right hand corner. Here, too, the symbolic highway borders wind sinuously around a variety of other images, including those Asian-style mountain peaks; petroglyphic symbols of birds, deer, and fish; a gnarled Bonsai-like tree in a verdant field under gathering clouds, and the yellow peering eyes of two blue cats. The cumulative effect of these images (the juxtaposition of the nude woman and masked faces recalling aspects of Stanley Kubrick’s final film “Eyes Wide Shut”) is to hint at the adventures and casual trysts that can occur far from home-or at very least, the opportunities for fantasy that being removed from one's normal life by travel can afford.
In these and other paintings, Sung Mo Cho gives us the odd juxtapositions of nature and man-made elements that make modern life so innately surreal. With brilliant colors and images that become visual metaphors for the restless modern spirit, he chronicles the journey of a Korean immigrant in America from the first tremors of culture shock along the lonesome highway to the mirror at the end of the road.
Sung Mo Cho’s solo show is on view at Pleiades Gallery, 530 West 25th St., from Sept 4 thru 22.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2001 GALLERY&STUDIO 27