Heejung Cho

 My works represent familiarity and alienation between people and their environment in the city. We constantly interact with typical sites of daily routine such as a laundromat, a coffee shop a grocery store, a studio, a subway and a street. The interaction creates a sense of reality and a psychological map of daily life. Using woodcarving, painting and photo collaging, I draw the local places that contain emotional transition and compressed time of life.

 

I make flatten sculptures or 3 dimensional paintings in relief as an individual work and sometimes integrate and compile them to be an installation according to their relation. The collection of different places becomes a map of my personal life and a collage of different neighborhood and cultures. It also represents the displacement and nomadic lifestyles of our times. As an immigrant artist myself, I have relocated to New York from Korea and moved neighborhoods to seek my real home.

 

My experience of living in NYC as an immigrant artist fuels me to create my own city from memory and emotion. Although I live in New York City physically, I feel like I reside in Seoul, Korea emotionally and mentally. The change of location causes the change of language, culture, perspective, social ability and personality. Recreating streets and buildings of different cities with subjective eyes and personal experiences, the reconstructed cityscape represents the multilayered displacement of culture and the loss of time and memory.