Artist
Yeonjoo Cho
@yeonjoo_cho
Yeonjoo Cho (조연주) is an artist and researcher based in Seoul, South Korea and Glasgow, United Kingdom. Centred on the tropes and ideas of 'Oriental Painting', her work explores the boundaries and intersections of cultures. Cho studied painting and art history at Ewha Womans University and completed her interdisciplinary PhD research which employs contemporary art practice, art history, and postcolonial discourses as three key columns.
Q1. What inspires the artist?
Yeonjoo is inspired by what she loved ones, narratives of women, sky and water.
Q3. How does Korean culture influence artist's art?
Yeonjoo studied Korean and East Asian art history as her second major in university. She explains that the question of what Korean or ‘Oriental’ art is and how it is different from European, so-called ‘Modern’ art was a starting point of her PhD research on Oriental painting, colonization, and hybridization.
Q5. What projects are currently being worked on?
Yeonjoo is working on a series of paintings titled Where Our Shadows Meet. This project focuses on the shapes and reflections seen and overlaid on windows. By taking the window as a place where encounter and division happen simultaneously, the project explores themes of home, inside and outside, longing, and belonging.
Q2. What does being a female artist mean?
Yeonjoo Cho feels that being a female artist means facing more career challenges. The glass ceiling, male-centric social norms, and the contrast between the image of an ideal career woman and motherhood make her artistic career more challenging. However, Yeonjoo believes being a female artist makes her more resilient, patient, and hardworking.
Q4. Who are the female artist role models, and why?
Yeonjoo does not have a particular female artist role model, as everyone’s life path is unique and cannot be mimicked or copied. But she does like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and her work, Dictee. Cha had a very short, tragic life, but her work was extraordinary and very true to herself. Her Korean identity was important in her work, yet her artistic domain did not belong to a specific culture or country.
Landscape without Land , 2022
Oil on canvas, 300 x 120 × 2 cm
‘Landscape without Land’ reflects Yeonjoo's experience living between South Korea and Scotland since 2017. The painting depicts journeys and connections rather than a fixed image of the land. Yeonjoo appreciates that the sky she sees in the UK differs from that of her loved ones in Korea. This physical distance between the two places represents her past and present selves. They are intricately connected beyond distance, borders and culture. This painting is inspired by a famous traditional Korean painting on a folding screen, ‘The Sun, the Moon, and Five Peaks’, which has distinctive features, but in Yeonjoo’s painting, the mountain peaks are blurred, and trees float in space. By erasing the idea of a fixed land, her painting emphasises the connection between different places and the individuals who move within them.