Written by:
Jocelyn Voo
Photographer:
Mark Tsang
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 15#1
“Guerilla art” is how Erica Cho describes her work, which almost sounds comical coming from the gentle, feminine, almost ethereal voice floating through the phone receiver. “I don’t really privilege one audience over another. The more spaces I can hit, the more satisfying it is to me.”
For the 30-year-old multi-medium artist, this doesn’t seem to be a problem. Having had her art—both print and in film—exhibited all over the North American continent, from California to New York to Canada, Cho is finally pausing her stint as a design lecturer at Scripps College to attend a seven-month artist’s residency in Provincetown, Massachusetts, specifically designed for emerging artists.
“Artists have had studios around here since around, like, 1911. I always knew Provincetown [had a large] gay community, but I didn’t know it was such a big place for queer artists.”
That sounds like…
“Heaven?” Cho interrupts me, laughing.
Well, yes.
For a woman whose work evolved from small-time woodcuts, comics and zines to large-scale exhibitions and annual film festivals, it sounds pretty much like a fantasy realized.
“I remember when I used to do abstract prints in college and, I don’t know why, but a lot of them were coded. My roommate took a look at my portfolio and said, ‘They look like a lot of breasts and vaginas.’ I was mortified! But then [I looked at it and] said, ‘Wow, you’re right. I need to get laid!’”
Cho’s roommate wasn’t the only one noticing the unconscious lesbian theme present in Cho’s early work. “[Lesbian artist] Deborah Kass came and I showed her my prints… and she said to me, ‘I really think [the portfolio] is your real art and the stuff on your wall is bullshit,’” Cho recalls, the timbre of her voice rising with recognition. “And that really impacted me. I took another look at my prints and saw stuff that was honest.”
Her latest exhibition, Ghost War, features an 8-by-8 foot mural, depicting a tiger’s head morphed with a snake’s body, encircling a five video screen installation that runs a stop-motion animation Our Cosmos, Our Chaos.
“The purpose of the film is to awaken consciousness to not only historical amnesia—the forgetting of events such as the Korean War—but to the trauma that is inflicted in the loss of cultural traditions, from the position of the immigrant American,” Cho explains.
Obviously, the film, which documents an androgynous child’s dream of the Forgotten War as her quest to political awakening, is at least in part autobiographical, mirroring Cho’s roots as a Philadelphia-born Korean American to parents who are survivors of the war.
“Each scene that I had discovered [while researching the war] does parallel the journey of the character in the film, in that she was discovering a history that she was unaware of,” Cho admits. “But in terms of the actual imagery in the film, it’s too fantastic to parallel real life.”
Beyond reality or not, Cho’s art does seem to unite polar dichotomies quite successfully: history and present time, Eastern and Western cultures, opposite genders and sexual stereotypes. Whereas Ghost War reflected on historical concepts, some of her film pieces, such as Schoolboy Art and We Got Moves You Ain’t Even Heard Of (Part One), are explore gender and sexuality. In fact, over the years Cho’s work has become a regular fixture at gay and lesbian film festivals.
“I think it’s really funny that if [queer artists] deal with lesbian or queer issues, or just sexuality in general, it’s suddenly about your identity, whereas if you were, say, a straight artist and dealing with sexuality, you’re doing erotica,” Cho says. “If I do lesbian art, it’s about sexuality.”
Indeed, Schoolboy Art, a film about a young prospective art school student who is ultimately admitted after befriending and having an affair with an older professor, is “really playful; it’s about alternative relationships that people have.” In the film short, Cho plays a Mr. Miyagi-like professor, and the part of the schoolboy went to a young man she met at a TrannyFest benefit in Los Angeles. “I met him and was like, ‘Oh, you’re really cute, you’ve gotta be in my video!’ People thought I was like the old man artist using the ‘you should be in my work’ line and hitting on him. But really, his youth appealed to me. I needed to get him before he was old and bitter and while he would still work for free.”
Though the audience’s reaction to her work is sometimes varied (“They’re not really sure if it’s lesbian or gay, but it tends to get categorized as everything… I think it’s because I play a lot with gender and sexuality and race and age difference, [and that’s] where people don’t understand”), Cho is no less convinced of the gravity of her work.
“You just make it how you can,” she explains simply. “For my art, the purpose is to transform people’s understanding of the world or the way they look at the world. I like to use aesthetics to draw people in and have them look at my work for more than two seconds, and then move them to question a predictable way of thinking, whether it’s looking at politics or history or sexuality in a different way and being asked to imagine something different… I like people to remain curious and if my work helps them be curious, then I think my work is successful.”
She pauses thoughtfully.
“You gotta suck them in somehow!”
Consider us hooked.
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