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Today we talk about

Mika Cho

Let’s leave for a moment the composed world of the professor Mika Cho, teacher of visual arts at Cal State University in Los Angeles and enter the joyful and articulated world of the painter Mika Cho.
Color, gesture, light, overlap of pictorial layers are her dominant trait, as well very free colors, bold shades, use of never primary but always complementary colors expressed in a rich palette.
Her art seems to get inspiration from the Far East art as a mood of solitude and peace. Despite being American, Cho is infused with a background that derives from her Korean parents from whom she learned the sense of tenacity and at the same time grace in trait and behavior.
Her paintings seem to be unreal, interior landscapes that rather refer to the abstract landscapes of the Japanese Yasunari Nakagomi, but imbued, in Cho’s paintings, with an intense, violent and charged coloring that connects her irreparably to her life within the artistic community of Los Angeles.
The work is composed of various overlapping layers of painting and this allows the viewer to look inside, or look beyond; rather, it is an invitation to discover something that must remain within the viewer’s interior.
So a self-discovery, a search for personal identity through those monochromatic yet so varied colors.
Her paintings have a “naturalistic” trait and connect them strait to Nature. Light, together with movement given by her gestures in the application of color, and the richness of the layers of overlapping paint, make the works rich and full of symbolic value.
Her world is made up of air, galaxies, possible other universes. But it is also made up of emotions and sensations related to the spectator’s own personal interiority.
Cho wants to get lost and make us lose in a journey to unknown worlds or in a journey within our equally unknown interiority.

A breath of pure air, a moment of suspension and pause from the everyday life of our existence.

 

 


Let’s explore her works

Mika Cho has been appointed as director of the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery and prior to this, she served as the chair of the Art Department at Cal State LA University.
She is art educator, researcher, educational consultant, curator and visual artist, herr main research interests are in art-related and educational issues.
“It is essential for art educators to be both informed in the practice of making art and its history, critical theories and philosophies, as well as to possess a command of teaching methodologies, instructional strategies, methods of assessment and educational policy…
My teaching is centered on the impact of visual representation in culture, and on art as a way of seeing the world at large and understanding it historically………. My mission ….as an art educator is to empower students by assisting them to acquire the investigative tools for developing their own concepts in what they learn”.
As an artist, she exhibited in United States and abroad extensively.