World of
            Poetry

Written with language of imagination and unreality: art critic Shim

     
"The world of Cho Yong-kac's art work is no more than an unrealistic, or irreel space, not surrealistic, or sureel. There is included neither a hidden escaping circumstance, which is a grammar in common use of surrealism, nor a psychological syndrome, which is rebellion against the real world in his world,"said art critic Shim Sang-yong in his critique of the painters work.
Reading of Cho's painting may start at the point where the framework of a mode-historic classification is again questioned, which gives up reading a text as a result of adhesion to grammar. There exists no surrealistic conception of a class that is the superiority of latency and the unconscious world over the conscious world.
In addition, the facts must not restrict Cho's world with an obsolete framework of mode history on a few fragmentary grounds.
The art critic notes that Cho's works are similar to Y. Tanguy's and Salvador Dali's. He said surrealistic properties are found on the whole in the vocal organs of
  
Cho's words of painting and their arrangements were borrowed partially from their works.
"Tanguy's vagueness is not seen in the atmosphere of Cho's painting space. The atmosphere suffering from melancholia is replaced with clearness of blue sky, and the atmosphere is dry even in that case in which a background is the sea. It is surrounded by neither esoteric atmosphere nor heretical mystery, and there are found symptoms of cutting and flying which often appeared in Dali's paintings, skeletons, and internal organs. There is no crater of Tanguy's nor a compound of man and planet in the same way, there is no Dali's distortion of Maeristic forms, long-expanded figures, or anthropomorphique found, meaning a landscape similar to human shape, either,"the critic said.
"All the more, we can not look at Cho's world of art only with automatisme, that is to say, liberation from mental pressure,"Shim said. Things which endow Cho's space with character-people, parks, architectural structures, lighthouse, a pierrot - are chosen in a full seriousness and arranged by intention, not things poured into his painting.
Cho's vision reflects his consciousness too clearly to wander about in an unknown abyss of latency. He explains on pages of his diary about work that "People walking up and down"is at once his own figure and that of his neighbors.
The position of the artist is twofold. A disinterested visual fixation willing to stare at space like that goes into an unreal world of fantasies and fictions. We can say he puts his fixation on reality and looks around at the unreal world.
Painter Cho is a graduate of Seoul National University College of Art. He currently teaches fine art at Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul. He was an exchange professor at Western Michigan University.
He has held more than a dozen solo exhibitions including ones in France and the United States. His mobile phone number is 011-757-5123. NW

Village of Poet; 400 x 240 cm; Acryle on Canvas; 2000

Painter Cho Yong-kac

At Polis: 71 x 73 cm; Oil on Canvas; 1985

Village of Poet; 91 x 72 cm; Mixed Media on Canvas; 2004

Village of Poet; 91 x 73 cm; Mixed Media on Canvas; 2003

Village of Poet; 61 x 41 cm; Acryle on Canvas; 2007

Village of Poet; 91 x 65 cm; Mixed Media on Canvas; 2004

Village of Poet; 91 x 116 cm; Mixed Material; 2000