"I try to express images of the city from my feelings and my memories. Mainly, I am trying to depict the unique images which the city has, and I am expressing my own imaginings of those sceneries. Namely, I am creating the imaginations which the scenery of the city inspires in me. I am expressing in my own language how the city appeared, through the artificial scenery of our daily life. Therefore, I would like to share these personal imaginations about the city, the city that I saw and felt before and the memories of that city with other people."At what perils do we attempt to share our memories with other people? A dear recollection relaxing in a hammock in that sunny region of the brain (Cortex Beach) coaxed into the bitter wind will freeze. There is a danger in creating this kind of sculpture; perhaps your technical skills are not good enough to express the memory correctly, maybe you will get the shape wrong. Glass is pretty without much manipulation, but childhood memories are too precious and too serious-- if you failed in recreating them accurately you would feel phony.
Seeing a memory expressed in glass, as some of Hyunsung Cho's work is, forces the hypothesis upon you that memory is fluid and outside the mind it becomes a solid shape. Even when memory is altered by seeing photographs later on, the feelings remain. To express these feelings proficiently is a type of release that few people can get satisfaction from but which Hyunsung Cho practices extensively in his glass work.
"When I was a child, the scenery of the city seen by the window from the railway was a new kind of world that I had never seen before, including a very high building and a high tower. The high building seen in the city was different than that I knew in my town. So, I often asked my parents about that weird building, and they gave me an answer. Even though they gave me correct answer, I still thought these were very weird stuffs, and I felt like I had entered some different world, like 'Alice in Wonderland'." The shape of this memory is a spearhead in "Warrior of the city" and a tall rectangular building on wheels in "Fastest runner of the city." Hyunsung Cho's shapes resonates with those of us who have moved between city to country and are sensitive enough to reflect on the experience, and they are original enough to draw critical eyes to his work. Lino Tagliapietra (Italian glass maestro), Tina Oldknow (curator for the Corning Museum of Glass), and Tom Hawk (gallery owner), recognized Hyunsung Cho's achievement when, as jurors, they awarded him Best in Show at the first Breakthrough Ideas in Global Glass competition this year.
"Heat Haze of the Highway," the piece he showed at BIGG, is a smoggy double-vision of a traffic jam on a hot day. The glass canvas is a cone shape, the base is a dense orange color where three lanes of traffic inch forward and the color fades to yellow at the tip of the cone as it curves around an invisible bend in the road. Hyunsung drew the images of the cars, road signs, and power lines using a low temperature glass enamel with a
fine brush. He scratched out some of the enamel, a lengthy process, and then fired the piece in a kiln two or three times. "I would like to say that I'm trying to produce the forms of my ideas. I'm not just focusing on skills or techniques or styles," he says when asked about his personal style of glassblowing. "I'm blowing glass to make forms that I want in my works. That's my style."
As a result of his award at BIGG, Hyunsung sold some of his art and also went with Hawk Gallery to this year's SOFA art fair in Chicago.
Hyunsung is from South Korea. He first encountered glass at a factory when he was 22. He then chose glass as a major even though his school didn't have any facilities for the art form. He didn't have the opportunity to see any good blown glass since there were so few glassblowers in Korea at the time. His first instructor was a goblet maker who had graduated from they Toyama Institute in Japan. He visited Japan and the Institute with his instructor and spent 15 days traveling around the country meeting artists and seeing their studios.
Wanting to experience life in another culture, he and his wife moved to the U.S. where he is currently an M.F.A. candidate in Studio Glass at the School of Art and Design, Southern Illinois University. He works under glass artist Jiyong Lee. In 2004 he received his M.A in Glass Design from Kookmin University in Seoul, Korea. In 2002 at Namseoul University in Chonan, Korea, he obtained his B.F.A. in Environment Design and Plastic Arts. School has been a good place for him to develop ideas and concepts, he says. "I'm kind of a dreamer. I liked history class because it seems like listening to old stories from my grandfather. Sometimes those gave me inspirations. Most art history classes I took in the U.S. were about Native American history. I never took that kind of class in Korea, so it was really interesting to me."
The most primal symbol of the city is the powerline. Even along stretches of countryside, the powerline is there connecting you back to the city. Telephone wire interrupts the open sky. The very first concept you learn in art class is perspective, telephone poles diminishing in size to the horizon. Hyunsung is one of the first glass artists to take a street/sketch aesthetic and apply it to glass. Along with cars in traffic, street lights and power lines stand out as the main symbols in Hyunsung's work. His simple line drawings fired onto the blown glass ally themselves with other urban landscape artists like glass artist Joe Feddersen and the panoramic print artist duo kozyndan who also emphasize this linear canopy in their art.
"Even though I now feel beauty in the city, it doesn't change any of the things in real city that are busy or boring, but my feeling is different, in my mind because now I see that beauty."
Hyunsung can pull beauty out of a traffic jam: It is inevitable that his work will be coveted by collectors for this quality.
See his work at: http://www.hyunsungchoglass.com/
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