Yuna Cho

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

My work moves slowly, like something breathing. I often think about what stays after something has passed in the moments, relationships, and places we have moved through. Working with handmade paper, plaster, wood, gelatin, and glycerin, each material shifts quietly as it responds to gravity, humidity, and touch. Through malleable mold-making, unsealed surfaces, and durational wetting, forms soften, erode, collapse, and harden again. Each becomes a living record of time and relationship, slowly adjusting to its surroundings. I grew up between Korea and Canada, navigating different cultural and linguistic environments and developing parallel selves shaped by different social expectations. Moving later through American academic institutions, I continued to experience what it means to enter unfamiliar environments and learn how to exist within them. These layered experiences shape how I think about materials: as bodies that adapt, absorb, and shift in response to their surroundings while retaining traces of where they have been. Some works are embossments that sit very close to the existing space, blending into the surface as though they have always been part of it. But as you shift your position, they assert themselves through light and angle. I think of it as a quiet negotiation between assimilation and assertion of the self, learning how to exist in a new environment without disappearing into it. Others are skins cast against and peeled from walls, floors, and temporary...

Artwork