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 REVIEW Walking the Line Seoungho Cho's video art captures the vague transition between the real and the imagined. BY KATE BONANSINGA |
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line/fire by Seoungho Cho Pacific Northwest College of Art, Philip Feldman Gallery 1241 NW Johnson St., 226-4391 Ends Jan. 30 Seoungho Cho's video installation ...in the midst of... was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1997. The Feldman Gallery is as dark as a starless night, its large window covered in black paper and its main door barred so that visitors enter from the dimly lit attached gallery at the rear. Projected on the wall across from this entrance is New York artist Seoungho Cho's video line/fire. Images appear in two areas, one directly above the other, moving rapidly from one to the next and often back again before a new image appears. Some are immediately recognizable, such as a string of flames or waves breaking on the ocean. Others are more difficult to place. Water from a faucet flows across the screen, dissecting it horizontally, and what initially looks like a line of static on a television screen is actually a shimmering borax plain in Death Valley. line/fire is a two-channel installation, in which one projector hangs from the ceiling and one rests on the floor; Cho considers this format to be his most challenging and evolved. The six-minute video, edited and colored to achieve the feeling of the borderland between the actual and the imagined, runs in a continuous loop. The soundtrack, also reminiscent of television static, was excerpted from the light of falling cars, a new recording by Stephen Vitiello, a musician who has collaborated with Cho on many video installations. As one of the newer media to secure a place in the contemporary art world, video walks the line between film and fine art. Its creation necessitates collaboration (Cho uses a camera assistant, a producer, a sound mixer and a post-production distributor) in a way that most gallery art does not, and the viewing experience is close to cinematic. But line/fire has no narrative, no characters and no plot, and in this sense it can be allied to abstract and landscape paintings. I suspect that when Mark Rothko's paintings were first exhibited in the 1950s, receptive viewers had a response similar to the one I had watching line/fire. I was able to draw some associations rooted in my many years of looking at art, and in my basic visual experience of the world, but there was also something new and unsettling about the piece. At times line/fire transported me momentarily to an almost sublime state; at other times it made me feel uncomfortable, almost annoyed, because of the rapidity with which the images changed. Much of the effect is in the presentation. In the back gallery are three of Cho's single-channel videos, shown in a continuous 30-minute loop on a television screen. Rev, from 1997, uses the pedestrian traffic of New York City as its subject. Forward, Back, Side, Forward Again, made in 1995, also captures the alienation of the urban environment. The most alluring images on this loop are of empty subway cars, which are as provocative as any in line/fire. But the TV screen doesn't offer the video installation's magnificent scale and subsequent impact on the viewer, which is possibly one reason Cho considers these to be his "sketches." Gerry Snyder, the dean of the bachelor of fine arts program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, was the artist's teacher at New York University. That connection, and additional funds from the college, brought Cho to Portland. The artist explains that at one point he felt an increasing sense of isolation and returned to his native Korea. When the feeling did not disappear, Cho decided that it was part of coming of age and returned to New York. Loneliness defines his imagery, from the empty expanses of Death Valley to New York's crowded streets. Considering that Cho is achieving international recognition, Portlanders should also seek out the work of Stephanie Powell, a young local video artist who uses images and ideas akin to his. Standing Under Water, recently shown in a group exhibition at Renshaw Gallery in McMinnville, included footage of ocean waves and of the legs of a child just learning to walk. In June 1997, the Regional Arts and Culture Council sponsored Powell's A Belly Full of Exhalations, an installation that explored the time between the inhalation and exhalation of a human breath. Powell's work approaches Cho's in quality, but whereas Powell explores the meeting of conscious and subconscious, Cho combines the recognizable with the ambiguous to underscore the delicacy of the divide between reality and illusion.
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