Catalogue > At random

BUOY/ SEOUNGHO CHO 6:21 MINUTES, COLOR, SOUND, 2008 The golden, barren landscape of Death Valley, California, recorded by Cho from a moving car, provides the luminous and mysterious texture of Buoy. As the title suggests, this work reflects on the polar extremes of this desert, which was once the floor of a vast sea, now traversed by sight-seeing tourists. In contrast to the horizontal landscape, which floats ceaselessly past Cho`s camera, vertical "strata" pattern the imagery, creating an axis between natural landscape and Cho`s composition. Cho accumulated his Death Valley footage over several years; the vertical patterning further represents the collapse of this footage into what appears to be a continuous drive through the desert.

Seoungho Cho was born in 1959 in Pusan, South Korea, and currently lives and works in New York. He received a BA and an MA in graphic arts from Hong-Ik University, Korea, and an MA in video art from New York University. He has had solo exhibitions in many prestigious venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and his videos have been shown in biennales and group screenings throughout Europe and North America. Cho has received various awards and grants, including ones from the Jerome and Rockefeller foundations. Cho uses digital image processing techniques to manipulate simple, everyday objects, scenes or landscapes into highly lyrical sound and image collages. Cho`s videos are often very painterly in their use of rich, saturated colour and exquisite composition of the space on the screen. The works sometimes involve subtly developed, open-ended narratives that emphasize the embodied nature of perception and experience. The formal aspects of Cho`s videos are closely tied to explorations of how nature is represented through technology, specifically how representation is constituted by traces of contact between bodies, technology and the environment.