November 6th ~ November 13th, 2017

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 9th at 5pm

Museum-Quality Installations Mesmerize the Mall

by Bill Wolak

The Riverside Gallery, which is located inside the Riverside Mall in Hackensack, New Jersey, is breaking new ground with a stunning video installation entitled “Time, Body & Desire: A Solo Exhibition by Yongshin Cho” featuring the renowned Korean video artist. The gallery, usually a well-lit space which has presented a wide variety of artists over the years, has been transformed into a darkened cave or grotto in which the artist’s installations glow eerily in the welcoming shadows. The artist Yongshin Cho is professor of fine arts at Chosen University in Korea. He has been invited to exhibit his installations around the world including in Korea, China, Japan, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has been awarded an MFA in plastic arts from Paris University and has worked as an artist in Paris for more than ten years. The show includes three provocative video pieces which dazzle the viewers who wander the dimly lit gallery. Immediately to the left as you enter the gallery is the spellbinding piece called “Pass.” It contains the juxtaposition of a naked woman’s torso with ocean waves breaking just before they reach the shore. The erotic torso shifts across the wall as the waves merge with the flesh, creating an almost hypnotic effect on the viewer. Next, to the right, is the most elaborate piece “The Song of the Mandrake.” This piece includes the projected naked body of a man juxtaposed with projections of other background images such as sunsets, trees, and other landscapes. In addition, in the center of the piece stands a clock inside of which other naked figures are projected while the entire floor space is covered with a myriad of white paper flowers. The overlapping sky and bodies and clock present the onlooker with an overall impression of the perishability of desire and the of relentlessness of time. The last, and perhaps the most striking of the installations, is entitled “The Crowd.” “The Crowd” consists of two parts: a womb-like white ball elevated about four feet off the ground upon which a series of fetal images are projected. Meanwhile, behind the ball is projected a repeating two minute film of a group of naked men and women who bend, touch, turn, and embrace together in a sensual motion reminiscent of ballet or Julian Beck’s Living Theater. The group becomes a single, interconnected body twisting and writhing in the void. This piece also includes a haunting sound track of breathing, panting, and bodies slapping against each other. In this case, the juxtaposition of images centers on the contrast between desire and the conception of life that it engenders. Yongshin Cho describes his intent in “The Crowd” in the following way: “This video installation is about social desire of human beings. Here the ball symbolizes the egg that humans should break to be born and also an earth where they should live with limitations. Even after humans break into a world to be born, they face another world to break in order to be free. They desire to break prejudice, injustice, inequality, or violence.” The installations, as the above quoted passage aptly shows, are well thought out, vibrant, sensual, and thought provoking. Yongshin Cho’s installations mix nakedness with environment, intimacy with detachment, sensuality with aloofness, reverie with examination. His elaborate, swaying, tantalizing images slowly evoke a trance in the spectator—a trance in which he or she is freed to experience a deeper longing, a yearning for what is ecstatic in the center of what is most alive.

Bill Wolak is a poet, photographer, and collage artist. He has just published his fifteenth book of poetry entitled The Nakedness Defense with Ekstasis Editions. Mr. Wolak teaches Creative Writing at the William Paterson University in New Jersey.