Island, two channel video, teaser 1 minute 30 seconds, (full length14 min 15 sec), 2021 
https://vimeo.com/469392668/8c4763ca48
FILMOGRAPHY

Island is a silent piece that depicts the life in an Island. Using island as a place and a metaphor for life, I interpret my own life in a dance piece. Inspired by all the islands I have lived in my life- London, Manhattan, and Jeju Island, I use dance as means of communication and hope. Under the pandemic I felt the urge to create a piece that relates to the repeated daily life cycle but at the same time, Island as a cross concept of reality and fantasy/paradise.
Set between the islands in three different countries, I compose the story of my journey to rediscover who I really am. In this deep and affecting journey of self-discovery, touching on issues of loneliness, isolation, and the perseverance of the human spirit.

Island can be referred as a place of life and a journey, in which I have paradoxical feelings between relief and discomfort from being trapped between fantasy and reality in life. The dancer in this video looks for something constantly as if she will never find that tangible hope empowered by nature.
Aesthetics of colour in the film relates to attitude towards an island. Colour of the costume- black and white dresses, emphasizing emotional instability that follows emotional engagement of the characters. Postures and movement with the sword depicts the character’s phycological state caused by the repressed and unconscious inner conflict ,in a living in an island.

Through this film, I add my own voice to the dance and to all the people who are afraid to forget who they are, and where they come from while reflecting on what they may have lost along the way.


Sum (Island)

Visual Kinematics: a State of Art (Void series)

Untitled

These paintings are a part of my Nature Blooming series – a series of work inspired by natural topography and bodies of water, rendered in different mediums. These paintings celebrate the pure beauty of nature and express the abstract forms of movement found therein. 

Family Bloom 4 

Family Bloom 1

Family Bloom 2

Left Eyelid and the Rain Forest, 152x152 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2021

Teaser link <https://vimeo.com/704820757>

Full length <https://vimeo.com/460408704/aa9bc30570>

  
I started making video about history of myself and memories from 2013\. This video depicts reality and illusion, past and present which overlaps and becomes one’s history, memory, and landscape. Through repeated activities and illusive situations in mundane days, I wanted to depict the experiences of illusions that goes back to the beginning and repeats endlessly. It happens dramatically between myself and in a specific place. I used various movement of nature taken from my vacation in Thailand in this video. This kind of composition of scenes and movement of nature are a result of discernment that depicts one’s desire. It also connects to society and one’s relationship to the society. 

Memory and Desire (No. 2)

Set inside an island in a metaverse of my own creation entitles: Meta-Islet, I placed the viewer as a vulnerable human being in the middle of the ocean facing impending effects of climate change, including rising sea levels, coastal damage due to plastic pollutants, extreme weather, and global warming.  I made NFTs from this metaverse focusing on these issues and appreciation about nature. Meta-Islet provides an interactive experience for the viewer to respond to climate change and species extinction.

Meta-Islet

Projection Mapping on Jabule buildingHan River ParkSeoul, Korea    
-Visualizing the Flower Garden of the West: spatial awareness of Korean mythology 
 
This art work was part of an exhibition entitled The Dream of Water and was commissioned by the Seoul Metropolitan Government. The project was aimed at raising awareness of Korean mythology by contextualizing the stories in a contemporary way and depicting the Flower Garden of West as a place to experience the virtually imagined scenery of myth from Jeju Island, Korea.  Cho created a performance that expresses the current state of peoples’ minds using the symbolic movements of a flying yoga performer, which then is transferred to 7 flowers from Igongbonpuri.  Flying yoga is performed with the cloth/wrapper as a tool to express the movement that mimics a flower blossom as it blooms and closes. 
 
The performance is a tool for experimenting with how human movements created from ritualistic dances of shamanistic practices and myths can be applied in a 3D environment using flowers and their reproductive organs. Each flower represents different states of human existence – evoking laughter, intimidation, death, sadness and the concept of reincarnation.  Cho creates these flowers in her mind by designing movements in order to visualize repeated actions that symbolize how contemporary people behave and react to certain situations that engender feelings such as destruction, grief, joy, prosperity and reincarnation. 

Flower Dance

Sounds of Fragment: Ecological Dreams, performance teaser, voice performance and single channel video, 8 channel sound, 20minutes, Nam June Paik art center, Gyeonggi media performance festival, November 18, 2017

Sounds of Fragment: Ecological Dreams

Elly Cho won the TIMES SQUARE Midnight Moment PROGRAM award in 2012.
The video, Visual Kinematics:  a state of art was screened on Times Square Billboards in New York City for the entire month of July. 


Visual kinematics: a state of art" (No.10)

Visual biomimetics: A State of Art (No.1) , 2021, installation view, video animation on LED, 2 minutes 30 seconds, Sunny Art Prize group exhibition, Sunny Art Centre, London
My recent research about color, nature and mental health brought new body of work that explores the relationship between ecology and human existence. By drawing on colors and movement of nature, aesthetic of being, and poetry in nature exploring a sense of mindfulness. I try to mimic the movement of the species and then expanding the drawing to a more imaginary scene of poeticism. I feel that nature is a place where everyone feels to be part of and being in nature, we feel we are together, connected.  I experiment further to stimulate viewer’s imaginative response to highly charged but nostalgic awareness of things long since past. 


Visual biomimetics: A State of Art (No.1)

In this video, the memories Cho has of growing up during childhood become fragments of imagery that compose the development of the story. Cho grew up traveling back and forth between the urban space of Seoul and the natural environment of Jeju Island. Her memories and feelings behind these experiences are depicted by traversing over the temporal boundaries of the present and past, as well as the line between reality and illusion.
Cho’s younger brother was hospitalized because of pneumonia and died suddenly and unexpectedly because of a medical accident on the day of the Eclipse in 1999. She was in London at the time. Cho tells the story of her childhood in the format of video art with fragments of her memories turned into the scenes that compose the movie.
In this video, sounds and music become pivotal points around the various conflicts the girl experiences. Audiences participate in and sympathize with the major and minor conflicts the girl experiences through the medium of various types of music and sounds found in nature.


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Elly Cho