Riddles in Good Order: On Omyo Cho’s Solo Exhibition <Jumbo Shrimp>

Systems and boundaries often work as the bases for perception. We measure sizes, heights and widths and differentiate between countries, genders, ages, and languages. Such acts of differentiation stimulate clear perception and, at the same time, generate mistakes of exclusion and restriction. It’s because they involve dichotomous and segmented thinking, rather than integrative thinking, and thus fall into the self-determined narrowness of the world by failing to connect the object and the subject, the inside and the outside, individual and society, and micro and macro.

Omyo Cho’s solo exhibition titled <Jumbo Shrimp>, an oxymoron that puts together jumbo meaning very large and shrimp, a small animal living in the sea, approaches us as a personal rhetoric responding imaginatively to this boundary. The exhibition penetrates multi-dimensional thinking that transcends and invalidates conventional examples, while delivering each work through delusional attempt to reveal and restructure the apparent cracks in the world. Here the exhibits become signs that visualize the trans-boundary imagination, rather than superficial representation of systems. This way, the exhibition summons not only the concepts but also the existence and functions of images to the realm of contradiction while continuing with trans-boundary and anti-systematic imagination (or delusion).

Actually, <Jumbo Shrimp> situates imaginary materials transcending boundaries at the center. The artist, who has moved through surrounding systems and materials that exist as parts and remains of life, such as Domuson (Thomson) paper cutting press, old deserted houses, and terms and conditions of web sites, lets imaginary images partially similar to those from science fictions intrude into the entire creation process as the main power for the conception of images in the exhibition. Genuine Imitation located at the innermost Exhibition Room A, which is also based on oxymoron, shows the point where the artist’s imagination expands beyond visual horizon. LED lighting device hanging from the low ceiling glows brightly like a prism opening an exit to a different time and space, dazzling viewers’ vision. The light moving irregularly and illuminating the floor like the spotlight on the theater stage captures images of ceramic potatoes that are not easily identifiable. These potatoes (tubers) that look like stones, sea creatures or rough lumps are placed in the various corners of the exhibition hall under the somewhat bizarre but romantic title of Potato Romance. The lumps called potatoes, set under the prism for new time and space, rise again as objects transcending the boundaries between yesterday and today, reality and fiction, and everyday life and art. The potatoes lying under the surrealistic light emitted by Genuine Imitation clearly demonstrate the exhibition’s purpose to jump over spatial and temporal boundaries and advance to another world.

In addition, the exhibition represents specific memories and impressions through objects and materials as part of indeterminate statements. The exhibit Jumbo Shrimp in Exhibition Room A may be considered in the same context. The work, which the artist derived from her childhood experience, evokes uniquely risky and edgy feelings using nets and glass. From what kind of experience have these materials been derived? The artist’s statement for the exhibition points to certain fear and trauma that have remained with her ever since she visited a ski resort with her parents. It occurred to her that the safety net under the ski lifts could break off anytime, and she threw her teddy bear and ski poles to check the security (or insecurity) of the net whenever she took the lift. After she grew up, a stuffed bear abandoned in front of her apartment building reminded her of the teddy bear that she had thrown away and her long forgotten childhood fear, just like the images of old photographs that we see in the Cloud. Nets made using thin and weak surgical chain, which is mainly used for accessories including necklaces and bracelets, can be seen as the outcome of the synchronization of her insecurity and fear from her past in the ski resort with the material. Also, ceramic bear statues found in several spots in Exhibition Room B conveys the mobility and ubiquity of the memories abruptly delivered intact from yesterday to today. Still, you cannot just understand Jumbo Shrimp from the perspective of personal recollections and feelings. The work incorporates jumping over clear perception. The artist moves the memories and impressions of materials, which have already settled down, to new experience and context. For example, the imperfection of surgical chain is connected to the ceramic tiles of Literature of the Other Place Coming from Another and Going to Another Place — originating from the distrust in CAPTCHA that verifies if an online user is really a human being — placed (also) on the floor of Exhibition Room B. Personal memories or fears get mingled with distrust in specific systems. Likewise, personal feelings overlap in multiple layers, instead of being simply put side by side visually, and get woven into different thoughts and feelings. The artist’s attempt to observe surroundings keenly and imagine transcendence over boundaries leads past personal realm to a broader horizon and generates expanded perception.

After all, the exhibition simultaneously activates both poles just as the title <Jumbo Shrimp> does. Her work perceives boundary thinking as a limitation and, at the same time, appropriates it as the source and abode of imagination. Here, it is highly interesting to witness the process in which personal and intrinsic delusions are restructured as formal and extrinsic thoughts, and especially the one in which perception of specific systems is converted to the conception of new images. The works in Exhibition Room B, which set the errors of captcha as a kind of source code, explain this quite well. First, Although Embarrassing, Particles Forming the Basis of Materials can be seen to show the images originating from the errors and malfunctions of captcha. The artist reveals the loophole of the audio captcha for the visually impaired using the two English words pair[peə(r)] and pear[peə(r)], which have the same pronunciation but totally different meanings. Large gourd-shaped English pear is printed on wide paper sheet, with the word ‘pear’ indicating the object overlapped under it. A pear (image) in the shape that can hardly be recognized as an ordinary pear, and the pear (written word) confused with another word can all be considered as signs shaking up the conventional cognition. By filling the wall in the exhibition room with the pear, the artist implicitly exposes the falsity of captcha that operates based on the classification of signs/codes. Furthermore, the pear overlaps separately and together with the words printed on the wall without any meanings or contexts and Literature of the Other Place Coming from Another and Going to Another Place composed of broken tiles on the floor. Composition of errors and meaninglessness of perception found in the works clearly attempts not to stick to but to escape from the conventional visual/sign systems. And this attitude is conveyed as the contradiction held by (non-)representation of undeterminability, or a kind of riddle, rather than a declaration with a period to mark the end of a sentence. Contrary to their expectation that they would be able to understand the purpose through the materials and images of the exhibits, the viewers continue to face ambiguous and indeterminate positions. Rabbits printed on the wall without any apparent reasons, words whose meanings we can’t figure out, potato tubers, bear statues with soles of dogs, and strange smoke coming from the inside all support the attempt for an indeterminate exhibition. Whereas the exhibition moving between the two poles represents clear images and materials, it keeps sliding down to a world not subordinated to any concrete categories.

Duality or contradiction of such an exhibition can be verified through the materials and methodologies of the work. Instead of convenient materials such as iso pink and polyurethane foam that many three dimensional artists use these days, the artist mainly utilizes ceramic, which requires long work and a lot of processing. What is the reason she chose ceramic art as a methodology for (non-)representation of undeterminability? In the exhibition, ceramic faithfully models the (impossible) attempt to represent the trans-boundary imagination. The ceramic tiles recall the first signs of humankind whereas the bear sculptures overlap with disembodied relics transcending time and space. The methodology of modeling that seeks unchangeable value intersects with plasticity filling up the exhibition rooms; this seemingly ironic scene resonates with the concept of contradiction presented as a way for the exhibition to transcend the boundaries. Moreover, ceramic does not hide the desire for the exhibition to retransmit the existing boundaries as new thinking and images, while preserving the process. In the exhibition, ceramic can be seen to present a materialistic documentary recording the intersection of impossibility, paradox and contradiction.

The ambiguity and indeterminacy of the exhibition are meticulous and solid, rather than weak and clumsy. The exhibits including the ceramic sculptures show distinct shapes and images, but the riddles inside them do not ever get solved. The contradicting challenge of (non-)representation of (trans-)boundary is ultimately focused on the ‘presentation’ as it is rather than ‘representation’ of uninterpretability that it has moved through. To encounter ‘riddles in good order,’ which does not present clear interpretation or correct answer, or to share the systems of movements that refuse to be restricted by boundaries, may be the contradiction that the exhibition is headed to in the end. These signs of contradiction may lead the viewers to capture the cracks in the dominant order and ponder over the outside world on a different level from the past. I try to discover from the images and materials in the exhibition, sliding down from the boundaries, the imagination of (non-)representation taking the fixed entity off the order of disorder.