On a sunny autumn day in 1971, a 14-year-old Byoung Soo Cho carried his friend’s mother’s coffin up a mountain in Seoul’s northern highlands. As the procession arrived at the burial site, he gazed at the hole carved out in the earth. It was a clean, rectangular shape, about two metres long, one metre wide and one-and-a-half metre deep, sharply cut out in the red, clay-like soil. Slowly, the coffin was lowered into the ground, hung from two long pieces of white fabric, perfectly filling the shape of the void.
The beauty of that image—the clean-cut hole gaping in the blushing earth, beneath the vivid blue sky—never left Cho. From this memory grew a fascination for the earth. Fifty-two years later, Cho drew from that memory and created Void in…
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Tatler Hong Kong (Digital) - 1 Issue, September 2023