Omyo Cho (b. 1984) has explored the past, present, and future through a literary imagination, crafting narratives of human life through form and material. Drawing inspiration from non-human lifeforms encountered in scientific news and science fiction—both in Korea and abroad—the artist imagines lives of a future yet to come and translates them into the present tense through sculpture, installation, and VR video.

Since the early stages of her practice, Omyo Cho has written fictional narratives before creating artworks, grounding her work in the imaginative worlds conceived in those stories. Her imagined narratives are translated into material forms, presented as new entities that operate within the physical reality as tangible objects.
 
Her first solo exhibition, 《The Trace of Things Unmentioned》 (Sidae Inn, 2018), was also based on this working process. For this exhibition, the artist transformed an abandoned inn located in the Changsin-dong jjokbangchon (a dense area of small single-room dwellings) into both an exhibition space and the subject of her work.

Omyo Cho imagined the lives of those who may have existed—but no longer do—by drawing inspiration from the remnants of a ruin. She sought to reveal their marginalized histories. For this, she used the abandoned Sidae Inn as both a stage and subject, envisioning twelve omnibus-style episodes that all end the same way, and embodied them in sculptural forms.
 
Through this process, her work gradually unveils the “traces of things unmentioned” left in the ruins—calling forth the imprints of lives and memories embedded within them, and giving them physical presence in the present.

Since then, Omyo Cho has turned her attention to various social issues arising in today’s digital age. For instance, in her 2020 exhibition 《Broken Reality》 at the Soorim Art Center, she questioned our contemporary perception of truth—one that is shaped within an internet environment flooded with fake news and countless pieces of information.

The artist recreated the phenomenon of lightly seeing and believing in things that appear visually beyond the smartphone screen but lack physical substance, using hologram technology within the exhibition space. By inviting viewers to lie down and gaze at holographic images that are clearly present before their eyes—yet vanish like a mirage the moment the power is turned off—she allowed them to viscerally experience the inescapable helplessness of a reality saturated with endless information.

In her 2021 solo exhibition 《Jumbo Shrimp》 at Artist Residency TEMI in Daejeon, Omyo Cho explored the accumulation of personal memories and data in the databases of giant tech corporations.
 
Through the exhibition, the artist addressed the contemporary issue of private memories and personal information being stored and potentially misused as data in the cloud. She created two distinct spaces within the exhibition, each telling a different story.
 
One side of the space was occupied by clay sculptures engraved with patterns from CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), a system used online to distinguish humans from robots.

While she uses the methodology of traditional sculpture to indirectly reveal the unsettling reality that even the clues used to distinguish humans from machines are now archived in massive digital databases, the other part of the exhibition reconstructs fragments drawn from the artist’s personal memories along with “images that failed to acquire meaning” circulating throughout society, all rendered in sculptural form.
 
For instance, a sculpture resembling a net made of metal chains and glass embodies a fearful childhood memory of riding a single-seat ski lift for the first time. Objects scattered on the safety net beneath—originally intended to protect—only reminded the artist of the possibility of falling

The artist overlaid the grid pattern of the CAPTCHA with the netting of the ski lift. While CAPTCHA distinguishes humans from robots, it does not understand the qualities that make us human—it merely confirms the human foundation, much like a loosely woven net. The artist considered that filling in these gaps might be the only realm left uniquely for humans.
 
By creating two exhibition spaces composed of entirely independent events that can be newly intertwined and interpreted depending on the viewer’s movement and gaze, the artist sought ways to fill the fragile and unstable gaps of our world.

In 2021, through a collaboration with a neuroscientist, Omyo Cho became acquainted with the “transfer of memory and vicarious sensation experiment” using sea slugs, a model for studying human brain cells. This naturally led the artist to incorporate science-fiction-inspired imagination into her work.
 
Since 2022, the ongoing series ‘Nudi Hallucination’ has drawn inspiration from the sea slug memory transfer experiment to envision a future where memories and emotions are digitized, circulated, and edited by others to construct one’s own identity.

The artist represents the intelligent beings living in this future as aquatic humanoids. According to the worldview created by the artist, future humanity, unable to survive on the surface due to environmental destruction, migrates to the deep sea and evolves into these aquatic forms.

The sculptural works of ‘Nudi Hallucination,’ representing the aquatic humanoids of the future, are designed to resemble the external and internal forms of sea slugs. The curved glass sculptures and jelly-like resin installations spreading across the floor evoke the flexible and soft bodies of mollusks.
 
Inside the transparent glass reside long fibrous neurons and neural cell bodies branching out like tree limbs, symbolizing memories stored and ready to be transplanted to others at any time

The work BarrelEye (2023), consisting of VR video and sculpture created within the same worldview, envisions a future technology that allows one to indirectly experience another’s memories as their own. It imagines the spatial and physical gaps that exist between the memories’ accompanying physical environment and the body.
 
Set in a future where life on the surface has become impossible, the VR world lets viewers wander through moments of touching various tangible memories and encountering others’ recollections firsthand.

Furthermore, in the 2023 solo exhibition 《Altered Fluid》 at Soorim Cube, Omyo Cho further developed the worldview of ‘Nudi Hallucination’ to address catastrophes caused by climate change and alternative ways of life in the post-disaster world. Just as ancient microbes reemerge as glaciers melt due to global warming, Cho’s sculptures function as fluid beings that reveal transformed states—either evolved or degenerated—of subterranean life forms that existed long before humanity.

The post-human entities she envisions are expressed through a blend of natural materials such as resin, aquatic plants, and mushrooms, blurring the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. Their bodies are not made of flesh and bones composed of proteins but are instead constructed from glass and stainless steel—materials that melt at temperatures exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius—designed to flow in a semi-solid state under varying environmental temperatures.
 
These futuristic bio-sculptures resemble primitive Paleozoic creatures yet present a new species born with brains, DNA, and evolutionary information that cannot be defined within the scope of accumulated human knowledge.

Omyo Cho’s work, which imagines new life emerging after the end of humanity, simultaneously reveals both the fantasies enabled by new technologies and the alternative possibilities that lie beneath them, questioning the attitude humans should adopt toward life in the future

 “The sculptures I create are small imaginings of a world after humans—a new life that may be born again after us. Borrowing a future perspective, these beings adapt to changing environments and rely on technology, yet find different meanings within it. Through these entities, I hope we can reconsider the ways of coexistence we have lost.”    (Omyo Cho, from a BE(ATTITUDE) interview) 

Omyo Cho graduated from Goldsmith's Department of Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include 《Altered fluid》 (Soorim Cube, Seoul, 2023), 《Punch-Drunk》 (Small Museum Bogugot, Gimpo, 2023), 《BarrelEye》 (OSISUN, Seoul, 2022), 《Jumbo Shrimp》 (Artist Residency TEMI, Daejeon, 2021), among others.
 
She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Cell Struggles》 (FOUNDRY SEOUL, Seoul, 2025), 《Art and Artificial Intelligence》 (Ulsan Art Museum, Ulsan, 2024), 《ZIP》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2024), 《4℃》 (Sehwa Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《LANDSCAPES》 (Wooson Gallery, Daegu, 2023), 《Data Jungwon》 (Kim Hee Soo Art Center, Seoul, 2022), and 《Shadowland》 (Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2021).
 
Omyo Cho has participated in residency programs such as the MMCA Residency (2022) and Seoul Art Space Geumcheon (2023). She received the Soorim Art Award in 2020 and was selected for the Art Basel Statements sector in 2024. Her works are part of the collection at the Soorim Art Center.

References

• 오묘초, Omyo Cho (Artist Website)
• 우손갤러리, 오묘초 (Wooson Gallery, Omyo Cho)
• 비애티튜드, 묵묵히, 조용히, 그리고 단단하게
• 월간미술, 오정은 – 다시 만난 세계의 기억
• 한겨레, “예술로 사회적 문제 풀어낼 수 있어야”, 2020.07.02
• 대전테미예술창작센터, 점보 쉬림프 (Artist Residency TEMI, Jumbo Shrimp)
• 수림큐브, [서문] 변형 액체 (Soorim Cube, [Preface] Altered fluid)
• 파운드리 서울, [서문] Cell Struggles (FOUNDRY SEOUL, [Preface] Cell Struggles)