Fire Escape Shadow
Artist
Y.J. Cho
(Taiwanese, born 1950)
Date1982
MediumWatercolor
Dimensions25 × 40 in. (63.5 × 101.6 cm)
ClassificationsDrawing
Object numberUAC2671
DescriptionFire Escape Shadow seems to be a canvas of very little, a blank wall, some metal, and a bit of shadow, though painted in a very detailed and gritty photorealistic style. Photorealism, or Super-realism, began in the 1960s as a display of an artist’s technical ability to create photographic-like images through paint. And in many of the same ways that photography asks questions about what is implied by the details of the picture, Fire Escape Shadow commentates on the world that made the image through its realism. On top of questions that the viewer can ponder about the context of the scene in the painting, there is also the technical achievement that Y.J. Cho has attained in her style of the photorealism genre.Many of Cho’s pieces through the 1980s show her interest in this kind of realism, where the subject is a wall of some building and the light dancing across the surface makes up the story and the peripheral details of the scene. In Fire Escape Shadow, these shadows are cast along the bottom left and upper right corners to imply other buildings, giving the urban space an intimate and familiar feeling.
Y.J. Cho is a taiwanese artist who works primarily in Hong Kong. Known for her style of photorealism and interest in otherwise mundane subject matter. In her latest series of paintings from 2020 and 2021, her signature water stain on the canvas has been placed over scenes of the clouds over Hong Kong to give the scenes a truly atmospheric effect.Cho Yeou Jui earned her BFA from National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei and later studied in the USA earning a MA from the State University of New York in Albany. Her work is included in Museums and collections in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States.
Written by Alex Heath
