Today we’d like to introduce you to Leena Cho.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
With my parents both as classical musicians and very religious people, I grew up with an intimate relationship with music and spirituality. It was clear since I was little that I had a sensitivity to colors and composition, and I showed an exceptional amount of focus when working on drawings, paintings or any kind of making with my hands. I was born in Texas but I moved with my whole family to Korea when I was about 9 years old. I held onto art-making even more after I moved to Korea, as I went through a dramatic shift in culture and languages. Art was and is the most universal way to connect with the world, and it offered me assurance, comfort and room to expand. Eager to study and immerse into the art world, I came back to the US, something like a homecoming. But I soon realized I was lost in between two worlds. Moving to Korea as a child, I was seen as and was called American, but in America, I was nothing but Korean. This duality, although not explicitly expressed in my work, became the underlying core of my body of work. I strive, in my personal life and in my art, to find beauty in the complexity and uneasiness of the dualities in life.
Please tell us about your art.
I am a painter, maker and a musician. Understanding and experiencing music inspires my visual work as my paintings and drawings influence my music. It is a cycle that sustains my creativity. My work is a study, but also a play, of the poetics in memory, spirituality and philosophy–more specifically, subjects like shadow and light, the rhythm of breath, and memories of home. There are dualities in the poetry of these things that I find intriguing. Shadow, breath, and memory all exist fluidly within the spaces of absence and presence. Shadows are formed through the absence of light. Often regarded secondary to the object, but the reality of the form is only affirmed through its shadows. Memories are a shadow of time. A moment of life becomes absent in the ‘now’ through the passage of time. A breath, the inhale and the exhale, is a constant cycle of emptying and filling, pulling in and pushing out. On the most intimate scale it echoes the rising and lowering tides and the moon’s orbit around the Earth. As does the moon, light follows the guidelines of Earth’s gravity. In the presence of its power it bends and moves. The power creates a rhythm, and they dance in space and time. In this dance, I explore the intimacy, complexity and power in transcendence and transparency. Either through compositions of saturated colors and forms, or subtle laborious mark-making, my paintings invite the viewers into an immersing meditative space. The power in the spaces created on the two dimensional surfaces in a painting or a drawing exists in the tension of the edges. The deliberately compose ‘edges’ in the work lead the viewers’ towards an experience of, in one form or another, self-reflection.
As a Korean-American woman artist, my experiences of cultural discordance, and the search through my layered self-identity continue to inspire and fuel my work.
What do you think about conditions for artists today? Has life become easier or harder for artists in recent years? What can cities like ours do to encourage and help art and artists thrive?
It is not exceptional for Boston, but the hardest part of being a professional artist, is that you will almost always have to balance your job as an artist with another part-time or even full-time job. I think if there were more available spaces for artist’s studios and housing at an affordable price, more funding for art programs, education on contemporary art in the community, not only will the local artists benefit, the community of the entire city will benefit from an enriched and healthier culture.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
I have a several pieces currently up at the Mass Eye and Ear and at The Massachusetts State Police. You can always visit my website, www.leenacho.com or my Instagram page @leenacho_art to see my recent work. You can contact me for inquiries about purchasing my original work, prints of the original work or commissions.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.leenacho.com
- Email: leenacho.art@gmail.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/leenacho_art/
Image Credit:
Leena Cho
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