Studio Artego is pleased to present Playground of Big AIE a solo exhibition by Hyon Hee Cho Hartberger.
The exhibition will feature 25 works by the artist, focusing on her newest BIG AIE, in which bright colors and delightful, primitive images are brought together.
BIG AIE is a character created by projecting the artist's own alter ego. Rather than a cartoon image of a typical character, the artist has created an image expressing a simplified human body and its movements based on the lines of the drawing. The other parts of the face are omitted and the two large eyes that look like overlapping diskettes are given a hyper-emphasis. The eyes function as a window that connects the artist with the world-at-large, symbolizing empathy and expansion, suggesting an open mind related to the many images that surround her.
The artist expresses the various emotional states of her character along with a light bulb that emits energy, birds, butterflies, flowers, fish, and a pet dog around her. In addition, the images of masks that fill the entire screen most likely refer to the artist herself, her friends, her family, etc. They can be seen as a cross-over between the artist's imagination and life reality. The primary colors and lines removed from the detailed description project the images into space and time, overlapping in a deliberately simplified way.
Cho's unique world of art is the essence of the artist's brush skills, which she learned while majoring in calligraphy and Korean traditional painting in Korea. Later, during her master's course in contemporary art in New York, she began to develop her visual language. A one-year residency, between 2018-19 at the Berlin Art Institute in Berlin, was particularly significant in giving her the opportunity in developing her personal expressive needs. The artist says she wanted to capture “loneliness, happiness, and sadness with nature and urban landscapes” through her unique characters.
In BIG AIE, “AIE” is a name created by the artist. The pronunciation “aie” has the same sound in both Chinese and Japanese. The meaning of the phonetic sound is “love.” According to Cho, her specific meaning for the character should be interpreted as “great love.” In doing so, the artist conveys a message of healing through BIG AIE – a self-contained feeling of loneliness and the frustration she felt during the pandemic.