“ZIP UP”, the Paradise Culture Foundation’s first open call project for exhibitions, seeks to develop various cultural contents and support talented artists as it expands the range of visual art production and its audience. The solo exhibition of Jaiyoung Cho, selected through the “ZIP UP” of the year 2017, takes on the subject of “Under the Paradise” as it questions the hierarchical order embedded in our innate system of perception. “I question everything that we believe in, depend on, and pursue, everything that discreetly exists beneath the paradise that we seek. What really is our paradise? What should it be?”

The works of Jaiyoung Cho address the invisible principles and their visible representations. The principles here however are the rather transfigured, the broken away from the present, the subtly flickering. The adverb “subtly” is added to convey that what the façade expresses is the portentous transfigurations of the quivering principles. The objects that Cho addresses are positioned in the narrow spaces in between the ‘normal’ and extinction. They belong to the unstable world where mutual exchange is possible before reality loses its resolution and is reverted to geometric shapes, or before materials return to the original state as alchemic souls.

In the exhibition Under the Paradise, Cho addresses the process of reaching a perfect world or the idealism of the world, and what would have existed before it. The process of reaching the ideal state encompasses everything other than the ideal. And it is this relative deduction that pushes the world into a state of anxiety. Language loses its object and objects are frozen. Relationships repeatedly derail and consciousness remains in the state of chaos. Nonetheless, from the perspective of an artist, such deduction serves as a momentum toward a new beginning and circulation, or jumping into a dimension different from infinitely reverting moments. It may be that a paradise is good enough existing “over there” or “up there”. Because it is its absence from the world we live in that produces our will to head toward it. How will the planes that border on the paradise be created? They will manifest in a form we have yet to discover. They will be revealed in an unprecedented format that forever challenges our language and consciousness.

Yoo, Jinsang (Professor, Kaywon University of Art & Design)