The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Duck-Hyun Cho was born in 1957 in Gangwon-Do Province, SouthKorea and has both a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master ofFineArts in Painting from Seoul National University. The first of the artist's several solo exhibitions was held at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul in 1988, and themost recent in 1993 at the Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, Los Angeles, United States. Other solo exhibitions have been held in Berlin, Germany and Wroclaw (Breslau), Poland as well as in South Korea. Duck-Hyun Cho has participated in a number of international group exhibitions including 'Festival Internationale de la Peinture de Cagnes', Cagnes,France, 1990; theHamburg Art Fair, Germany, 1991; and 'Korean Con­ temporary Painting', Art Core Annexe, Los Angeles, United States, 1992. The artist's work has won several prizes: special prizes from the 'GrandArt Exhibition ofKorea' in 1989 and the 'Art Exhibition ofTotal Museum', 1991; and Grand Prize, 'Dong-Ah ArtFestival', 1990. Duck-Hyun Che's work is represented in several collections in South Korea, including that of ti,e Dong-Ah Press Center, Seoul and Seonjae Museum of ContemporaryArt, Kyungjoo. Duck-Hyun Cho is a professor in theDepartment ofFine Art at Hansung University in Seoul and has a studio at the University. Duck-Hyun Cho is regarded as a painter whose accurate description of modern Korean history gives richness and splendour to contemporaryKorean art. To understand his works one must know their historical and social context. There exists in and aroundhisworks a kindof 'aura', to useWalter Benjamin's term. This 'aura' is shared with his contemporaries, but in a different way. Duck-Hyun Che's works show the apparent experience of the artist himself and his contemporaries and at the same time ask why this kind of individual experience should be sublimated to universal experi­ ence. His works reveal the organic tension between commonness and discrimination of experience, this tension appearing as the double structure of reality and ideal. Duck-Hyun Cho believes that true communion through art is both something difficult and something that can be un­ expectedly forced on the viewer. In his opinion, art does not become art when all is openedup before the viewer's sight andmind. His serial works Memoirs of 20th century combine past and present and explore certain profound moral ambiguities of human SOUTH KOREA DUCK-HYUN CHO Pandora's box 1993 Graphite and charcoal on canvas, steel, map and graphite on wood Canvas: 90x90cm Wood, 6 panels: 210x210cm (each) Collection: The artist experience. In a solo exhibition in Korea in 1992 he concentrated on describing more acutely and sensitively the feminine side of Korean history hidden behind the passage of time. As the realistic foundation of his artistic worksDuck-HyunCho generallyuses old and forgotten historical photographs. Using this device, together with objects such as map' , violin, mirror, threads and earth, the artist presents a critical representation of reality with free indirect narration.Here, the producer of art is placed as an intermediate narrator, and multiple points of view in recognising historical issues are suggested allusively. AlthoughDuck-Hyun Che's hyperrealistic works are cool and objective in conveying his artistic philosophy, they still give the viewer a sense of solidarity because they bring to life historical moments of the twentieth century. His works depicting moments of historical significance bear the tensions of this century 81 and bind the dead to the living, and the living to the unborn of the future. Based onan artic le by Jong Soong Rhee and biographical data supplied bythe National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea