REVIEW
- Maurice Taplinger - "Diverse Angles of Vision in the Art of Sung Mo Cho" (2003)
The Korean- born artist Sung Mo Cho expands upon a theme he debuted in a previous exhibition in his new solo exhibition, “Along the Road,” at Pleiades Gallery, 530 West 25th Street, from April 22 through May 10.
Cho, who is presently an adjunct professor at Mercy College in New York and has exhibited widely in both Korea and the United States, cannot be called a landscape painter in any traditional sense of the term. For while elements of landscape are present in his paintings, his compositions delineate a terrain that is not only partly man-made but also often includes superimpositions of diverse imagery.
In one acrylic on traditional Korean paper, for example, Cho juxtaposes gracefully delineated trees, clouds, floating floral forms, and a small self-portrait. More typically, he gives us simultaneous views of natural and urban vistas in the same picture. These juxtapositions imbue his compositions with a sense of time; of the shifting visions and views, as in a Chinese handscroll, where the land unrolls before one almost cinematically.
Cho, though, expresses the more disjointed sensations of our fragmented modern world in another manner: by dividing his compositions into sections separated by highways. These symbolic linear highways, with their white divider lines, are painted in different colors in different paintings and wind gracefully through the compositions, in which they are major elements. Although they are seen from an aerial perspective, much as highways are delineated on a map, the images that they weave between are painted head-on.
In one particularly affecting painting in the “Along the Road” series, Cho combines images of a graceful Asian tree, a large, stylized red rose, and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, with other city buildings clustered far below them. Here, rather than the linear highway symbols seen in most of Cho's other paintings, the divisions between images are created with jagged red strokes, broken off like lightning bolts, seeming to symbolize a sense of violent fracture.
Aside from these singularly stark elements, however, the more delicate strokes of color with which Cho knits all of his compositions together, combining primary and secondary colors with great sensitivity to create subtle chromatic harmonies, make the overall mood of this painting tender and elegiac. For along with being an exquisite colorist, Sung Mo Cho is a sublime painter, possessed of a technical mastery which lends his relatively small paintings a presence and a power surpassing that of many larger works.
While the overblown scale of many contemporary paintings tends to keep the viewer at arm's length, Cho's intimate pictures seduce us with their “touch”: the finesse with which he wields his brush to build the surfaces in his pictures with myriad strokes that simultaneously resemble the sunny, succulent daubs of Impressionism and the linear delicacy of Asian ink and watercolor painting.
Particularly lovely in this regard is the acrylic on Korean traditional paper entitled “Along the Road—City & Nature,” 2022, in which Cho combines several different techniques in different areas of the picture. In the lower left portion of the composition, an earthy, hilly terrain lit by a full moon is limned in softly muted strokes, while the larger area on the right combines a neo-pointillistic sky with a glistening tour de force of an atmospheric nocturnal cityscape. Over this, a slender tree is superimposed and sharply delineated in a precise, decorative manner reminiscent of art nouveau.
Few other painters could merge so many diverse elements into a harmoniously satisfying whole. Nor could they carry off a composition such as Cho's “Along the Road—Nature,” 2003, a more loosely painted work in acrylic on matboard, in which the wind-blown branches of bare winter trees, juxtaposed with a winding gray road, are distorted in an eerily elongated manner akin to the hair-raising Expressionism of Edvard Munch. In yet another acrylic on canvas, “Along the Road—The Image of the City & Nature,” three landscape images painted in pale colors with a distinctly Asian atmosphere give way to a larger image that suggests a rainy night in the city seen through the gridded panes of a window, loosely brushed in a vigorous semi-abstract manner.
Equally striking is Cho's unusual handling of space, as seen in “Along the Road —S. Nature,” 2002,” an acrylic on canvas in which the dominant image of a sinuous tree with red buds, set against a deep ocher ground, hugs the picture plane flatly, while an area immediately below it opens to a vista of a landscape where a winding highway weaves between trees in deep perspective. Here, as in other paintings by Cho, discrete areas bordered by his linear highway symbols open like windows within the larger composition, offering glimpses of other places and contrasting spaces.
It is Sung Mo Cho's ability to combine so many different techniques and angles of vision, even while working within more or less consistent formats and with similar subjects, that enables him to imbue each of his compositions with its own distinctive mood and make it a complex and challenging visual metaphor for our transient age.
GALLERY&STUDIO 7 - APRIL/MAY 2003