Cho Choon ja : Plane of Meditation & Awareness

▲38x45.5cm, 2010

 

Plane of Meditation & Awareness
-Cho Choon ja's Invited Exhibition-

                                                                                        Written by  Yi, Heui yeong (art critic)

This exhibition was planned to retrospect on Cho Choon-Ja's artistic development and to introduce recent changes of the artist who has dedicated herself to colored figure picture to maintain and develop traditional painting for about 30 years. She is well known as an artist who represents bare women by a clear drawing and a clean coloring to clearly, meditatively do women's beauty. The women exposed on her canvas make us recover a pure pleasure of seeing and meditation beyond a conventional notion of exposed women as sexual object. Her figure picture is characterized by this.

She studied art in the mid/late 1970s when there were opposing opinions on art issues. Young artists confronted at that time situations of dualistic oppositions such as oriental painting versus western painting, Indian ink painting versus colored picture, content versus form. She decided to synthesize these oppositions by her own method without choosing either one or the other. Her method became known to the world by her figure picture in the early 1980s. Since then, she has experimented on restoring the clear forms of figures on plane.

33.5X24.5cm

Her coloring is done by a new method by which color soaks through the surface, different from a traditional colored picture which is totally dependent on layering on it. As soaking is a tradition of Indian ink painting, therefore, her plane is a soaked coloring. This is a trial for her to synthesize an imposed confrontation of the opposed aspects such like coloring versus Indian ink as plane, a concrete characteristic. It might be said that a solid drawing of figures is soaked through the surface, with depended on coloring. Her experiment like this has been evaluated as important for giving notice of a new development of traditional painting and opening its possibility. And her artistic fruit like this has been recognized by receiving Chunchoo Art Award and Woljeon Art Award.

▲71x91cm, 2010

▲ 41x31.8cm, 2010

Our eyes have been recently caught by the works of art which stimulate the nerves and seem to be hurriedly created for commercialism. Much concern is being voiced about a crisis in painting by the introduction of media with cutting-edge technology and extreme experiments. By synthesizing the illusion of a figure seen beyond the plane and the physical truth of the surface on which the illusion is, Cho Choon-Ja's painting shows us that coloring which has been neglected since modern times, is, in fact, a visual factor inherited in Korean blood. I expect that, through this exhibition, we could see the possibility of the painting which wakes up our lost nature and restores it.

 Cho, Choon ja

Education
1980 B.F.A College of fine Arts, Hong-ik University, Seoul, Korea
1982 M.F.A Graduate school of fine Arts, Hong-ik University, Seoul, Korea

 Solo & Invited Exhibitions
2011  Lady Palace  Gallery 
2010 Solo Exhibition  Wooduk Gallery

 Solo Exhibition MayJune Gallery
 Choon CHoo Art Festival, Hangaram Art Museum-Seoul Arts Center
2008 JangEunSun Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2006 The 6th Woljeon ART Prize, Dongsanbang Gallery, Seoul, Korea
 Gallery Hue, Seoul, Korea

Group Exhibition and Invited Exhibition
1981-2008 Choon Choo Fine Arts Exhibition
1998-2010 Korea Figure painting Group Exhibition
2011   L.A. Art Fair. U.S.A.
        New York Art Fair U.S.A.
2010 Sydney Art Fair, Sydney, Australia
 Incheon Global Cities Art Exchange Exhibition
 Exhibition of Professor korean national University
2009 Painting of 23 Artists, GAGA Gallery

1984-2000  Lecturer of Fine Art college at Kang-nam University, Busan University,
             Chang-won University, Kyunggi University, Korea University
2011        Lecturer of Korean national University of Cultural Heritage

▲130x90cm, 2010