We have really appreciated your successful attempt to make visible the subliminal intercommunication between the distinctive languages, stimulating the viewer’s psyche on both the subconscious and the conscious level. In this sense, your artworks seem to invite the viewers to look inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface. Austrian Art historian Ernst Gombrich once remarked the importance of providing a space for the viewers to project onto: how important is for you to trigger the viewers' imagination in order to address them to elaborate personal interpretations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood?

Eun Sun Cho : I do think that it is essential to trigger the viewer's imagination for personal interpretation because through viewer's contribution to the artwork, the comprehension range of artwork could reach out to the affluent realm beyond the limitation of artist's intention and conception. An author of the work presents a specific framework for the work such as motivations and ideas behind it. And it is personally more about documenting my paths finely enough to infer from them that one could put various conception into coherence in a certain way. I reckon that as soon as every artwork leaves from the artist, it is handed to the viewers who have the right to freely interpret and reconstruct the artwork whether or not the artist intended the work to be seen in a specific way. 

Another interesting project of yours that has particularly impressed us and that we would like to introduce to our readers is entitled Silver grain body. As you have remarked once, in your body of works analogue negative of portraits has exposed on the negative film, and then the enlarged positive film exposed repeatedly on another negative, so 20 times of the process. Each of enlarged portraits has been then cut into amorphous irregular pieces with diversified sized so that they imitate silver grain formation. How did you develop such unconventional technique in order to achieve such brilliant results?
 

Eun Sun Cho : I have done a lot of portrait series while studying at the Neue Schule für Fotografie Berlin because I thought it would be series. But ultimately, I realized that my interest flows into the intersectionality between scientific themes and photography, and I could not find any use for the portraits. Amid the frustration, then I had the strangest encounter with a woman in Berlin who claimed to be cloned by the government. It sounded just insane to me, but it revived my interest in modern biotechnology whether her story was true or not. From the research, I found out the cloning in biotechnology already existed in the same year that the structure of DNA was revealed. I intuitively felt from the story of the most cloned cell line(HeLa) in the world that it could have something to do with the photographic reality. So I wanted to develop the project starting from an analogue portrait to cell-like form which imitates forms of the silver grain in negative film. Also, it was essential to present the formula of the chemical process as well as the measurement of fictive grains since it is related to the reality of the technical aspect of analogue photography and biochemical means so that it arouses the blurriness of the line between physical body and body through Medium on the micro-level.

We have appreciated the way Reconstruction of Architecture invites the viewers to question the way how human being interacts with the environment, highlighting the tension between the body and its surroudings. How do you consider the role of memory — including the places that you have had the chance to visit — playing within your process and how does everyday life's experience fuel your artistic research?

Eun Sun Cho : For „Reconstruction of Architecture“ I had various influences in terms of concepts over time. It took me some time to realize that the series would be part of the book „Ich und Du“ that I am preparing. At a certain point, I realized that the series like „land of land“ and „Invention of geometry“ reflects the zero ground status whereas „Reconstruction of Architecture“ deals with building elements in the physical world. By moving to Berlin, I had a chance to delve myself into a new language, culture and lifestyle which are so to speak to me building whole structure of myself once again from the bottom in a new surrounding. It actually helped me a lot to make a new life in the new environment again since I moved quite a lot from place to place as a child. So the combination of childhood memories and new life in Berlin have been the fuel of developing the Series „Reconstruction of Architecture“ as a metaphor for the restructuring the life.

With learning mathematics, my everyday life‘s experience somehow remains unperturbed and retain my composure with the intellectual challenge that I find the most fascinating. It keeps my work inside the sheer theoretical world with a specific structure that represents the concealed core of the mechanism of the physical phenomenon, which is the main interest in my artistic research.

In a controversial quote, German photographer Thomas Ruff stated that ''nowadays you don't have to paint to be an artist: you can just create photographs in a realistic way". Provocatively, the German photographer highlighted the short circuit between the act of looking and that of thinking critically about images: how do you consider the role of photography in our contemporary age, constantly saturated by ubiquitous images?

Eun Sun Cho : Through overload, overrun and overabundance by the images on an unprecedented scale in modern society, the cognitive effect is to be seen in every part of society, namely “photo-taking impairment effect” – the idea that photographing may discourage remembering. That implies at a certain point that we do not need to remember anything in a reality where photography becomes the life form in which everything is automatically photographed, and we could only cognize the world through the perspective of the photographed world. So, in that sense, the role of photography in our contemporary age is to resolve the discrepancy between photographed reality and our perception of it and its actuality, in my opinion.

Over the years your artworks have exhibited in several occasions, including your show at Nou Wave Gallery in London and at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literature, in Mainz: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? Direct relationship with the viewers in a physical context is definetely the most important one, in order to snatch the spirit of a work of Art. However, as the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to the online realm — as Instagram — increases: how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised audience?