Oil painting was Korean artist Hey Kyung Cho’s first means of expression. Her subjects were partly imaginary landscapes, with the refinement and precious approach, of trace and colour, of the Far-East artists, like the late great Chinese artist Zao-Wu-Ki, along with a personal rapport to nature or calligraphy in perfect communion with Western contemporary art trends. Having evolved first towards a formal eclecticism in which natural objects were placed on paper and infused with her spirit, following rhythmical precision, now she proposes photography or video based installations.

Her travels in Europe provoked two aesthetic shocks that re-orientated all her work. First, it was the discovery, while studying in Scotland, of Fingal’s Cave, a natural formation in the Isle of Staffa, the basalt ‘cathedral’ that inspired Walter Scott, Turner and Mendelssohn, and even Western contemporary dance, particularly a ballet by Pina Bausch. Austere, perhaps allusive, but transformed by quasi religious and romantic emotions, she tried to reveal the hidden movements and rhythms of the visible world like listening to the Earth through silence and the inaudible, finding colour through the sound vibrations. Like for Baudelaire, Kandinsky, Klee, Dufy, John Cage and others, sound and colour establish a dialogue, superimpose and confound in the harmony of sensitive vibrations. Skilful in the use of space and light –at some point she considered studying architecture- she organises around the photography of those places that relate to her and the natural materials that converse with them. These materials are painted with symbolic tonalities that suggest to her courage or hope (blue), austerity and mystery (black), enchantment and joy (white), passion and vitality (red): positive signs that establish a bond between the visible and the imaginary, the material and the spiritual, the front or the back of the mirror.