Galleria Ramo is pleased to present Hyun Cho’s solo exhibition Hurricane Billy, introducing a series of new works or rather idiosyncratic notes created by our South Korean artist. Her desire to explore the meaning of individuality and to define her personal “freedoms”, in terms of what may be called a “natural truth”, is a crucial part of understanding all of her works.

Hyun Cho: Hurricane Billy
Text: Richard Kean
18 February - 30 April, 2023
Galleria Ramo, Como

Hyun Cho explores personal agency within the commodified field of the built environment and pop culture which is often referenced in experimental ways. Cho’s work is consciously seductive in its forms, colour and energy that provide ephemeral moments of critical contemplation. Cho’s work uses materiality, process, objects, text and poetry through an intuitive practice of self-expression as a form of personal agency in an increasingly restricted world. Cho’s objects and assemblies are like a sculptural graffiti or musical sampling where the audience is presented with sculptural compositions and installations that playfully consider the semantics of the commodified, architectural, stratified societal field into the gallery space. This forms a contemplative condition that reflects the fabricated human world of refined materiality and endless semantic relations and histories back onto the audience.
Cho composes slogans and poetry that are used in her installations and sculptures that ‘feel’ like a pop-culture reference. The slogans Cho uses such as Ask My Daddy or Cho’s poetry structured like punk-rock lyrics such as Crucial Bebe No.1, are used self-referentially in her works over time, thereby simulating pop culture referentiality while at once maintaining individual agency in all creative gestures. Cho explores the possibility to different meaning that this provides, providing critical reflection on the possibilities of language and text within the context of the reproducibility of commodified culture and popular culture, while also within the context of creative individual agency which is the central philosophical concern of Cho’s work.
Cho intuitively creates hybrid forms where mass-produced items are recast as bespoke objects. These are then referentially combined with ready-made objects, such as Cho’s bespoke and functionally useless cast resin skateboard wheels attached to ready-made skateboard trucks in Hurricane Billy #3 (Dennis Hopper!). These assemblages are then glued to ready-made cinderblocks, semantically implying a skateboard. But this ‘skateboard’ somehow references the ephemeral act of skating in the built environment, as a gesture that invades public and private space, that rebelliously critiques the function of space and recontextualises the forms and materials of the built environment into the ephemeral time-based act that is skating. The act of skating has always implied a personal agency or freedom, one that Cho has identified and explored intuitively and through critical reflection in her work over the course of her practice.
These references in Cho’s work are therefore ephemeral, it is like we are being given the experience of something real that actually isn’t present, while experiencing something real that perhaps cannot be. There is a cultural indication in Cho’s work that is never really found except in the individual minds of the audience and the references they identify. The commercialised experience and how it parasitically integrates with the built environment, and those that live within it, is playfully and honestly evident in Cho’s assemblage for her audience to recognise via their own lived experience of the commodified mass-production of the same.

Hyun Cho (Seul, KR 1982) has exhibited in various exhibitions in Italy, USA, Australia and Turkey. Including: Spazio Gamma in Milan, ISIT.online and Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. She has participated in various residences including Palazzo Monti Residency and is currently in residence in Milan in Via Farini. She lives and works between Korea and Italy