Gallery BK will hold Cho Haeyoung’s solo exhibition Tinted Grey from September 20 to October 11 at BK Hannam.

Cho, an artist who has built her practice around paintings of nonspecific landscapes and spaces, takes a camera around, ready to spot unfamiliar moments from the landscapes or distances around her. When she runs into such a moment, she captures it using her camera and uses the photograph to transfer the moment onto her canvas.

To Cho, the process of recording unfamiliar scenes in photos functions as the trigger that resummons the sensations and memories that had occurred on the original site. This means that, although Cho refers to photographs as she paints, the movements and marks of her brush are not direct representations of what is shown in the photos. Instead, the paintings are the archives of what her senses experienced at a particular moment.

“I resummon the sensory experience in my head and paint out the first scene at a quick speed. Afterward, the canvas is coinhabited by incredibly punctual yet hesitant brushmarks — necessary yet boring marks. As I connect and unfold these, I move ever nearer to the time and space I had experienced.” – Excerpted from Cho’s artist statement.

Cho turns the objects and scenes she collected into nonutilitarian and amorphous states, entirely severed from the context they originally belonged in and rid of any information. Also, using the brush as if it were a utensil, she minimizes information contained in the brushmarks, and these marks accumulate and build layers to arrive at a characteristically flat painting. The countless, repetitive movements of the brush create a dreamlike ambiance.

“I refine the haphazard brushmarks on my canvas until they become similar to the sensations I had experienced. And, when I build multiples of such layers, they reveal to me how much space I have between “what I want to paint” and “what I am allowed to paint.” The distance between what I want to paint and what the hand can carry out differs widely from painting to painting. For instance, in this show, Tinted Grey, I am revealing a new series, Grey Tinted Rainbow. Here, the psychological experience and the act of painting are relatively close to each other.” – Excerpted from Cho’s artist statement.

In presenting Tinted Grey, Gallery BK hopes to encourage imagination from viewers and further expand the frontiers of painterly practice by highlighting Cho’s nonspecific and dreamlike works. The solo show will feature a selection of Cho’s ongoing series, including Magenta-Green (2016~), White Curve (2017~), and White Curve-Rainbow Tinted (2019~), and her new series, Grey Tinted Rainbow, inspired by the sensation she gained from observing exotic color combinations hovering in the atmosphere.

Gallery BK