Can the living save the dead?
Woohee Cho
Opening Reception: Friday,January 10th, 2025| 6-9pm | Free-To-Attend
Friday,January 10th, 2025 – Sunday, February 16, 2025
Presented in Black Box
About the Exhibition
Can the present help the past? Can the living save the dead?
The video begins with these two questions by writer Han Kang, which consumed the artist for more than a year. It follows the artist’s path through the mourning process after losing his sister. The 35-minute video contains charged materials: memorial recordings, journals read by others, visits to the site of her grave and the hospital she stayed in, and mundane footage of his family in nature. Alongside these, recurring images of water suggest the absence of his sister, who once believed she was a mermaid.
Rather than explaining every detail of his loss—their ambivalent relationship, their shared struggles with severe mental health issues, and the fact that his parents didn’t tell him about her death for five months—the work suppresses and implies, mirroring how grief and emotional repression shaped his mourning.
Although there may not be the right answer to grief, it suggests the two questions might need to be flipped: “Can the past help the present? Can the dead save the living?” Her death forced him to stay longer in Korea, reconnecting him with his family. Shoot what interested him and edit with gut, this video is a work in progress, much like the process of navigating loss itself.
About the Artist
Woohee Cho is a visual artist, performer, and experimental filmmaker based in Los Angeles and Seoul. His work focuses on moments in everyday life where individual identity collides with or is subsumed by society, queering these experiences through installations, videos, and performances. Gathering, personalizing, and laughing are the primary methodologies of his practice. He has held solo exhibitions at Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul (2023). His works have been shown at Fellows of Contemporary Art, LA (2024); Human Resources, LA (2024); Brussels Independent Film Festival, Brussels (2022); Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor (2021); Cork International Film Festival, Ireland (2021); OUTFEST Film Festival, Los Angeles (2021); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2020); and Roy Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) (2019), among others. He has been awarded artist residencies at the Alex Brown Foundation, Des Moines (2024); NARS Foundation, Brooklyn (2023); The REEF, Los Angeles (2020-2021); and Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, NYC (2019). He has also received grants, including the Visual Arts Fellowship from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Seoul (2023); and the Body and Tech Fellowship from The Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance at CalArts, Valencia (2019).
