REVIEW
by Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos
According to Derrida's parameters, Anese Cho's works are considered postmodern as they deal with fragmentation and discontinuity. In her Fragmentation series, she has deconstructed the female body, acknowledging that its break up does not have one root cause or basic meaning.
Rather, Cho's philosophy of fragmentation is like Derrida's assumption that many causes exist. We borrow Derrida's terminology, which used linguistic structuralism to discuss the works of Cho, who depicts female body parts or separate passages.
Derrida agreed with Ferdinand Saussure's beliefs that the context gives meaning to the word parole. Thus, if we were to associate Cho's sculptures with the word metaphor, we can assume the meaning of her pieces taken as a whole rather than their placement. For example, her female breast sculptures relate to a woman's anatomy and signal a whole female body.
Cho tries to uncover the suppressed and excluded female without simply interpreting but rather to demonstrate that her life is always in flux. In a social sense, Cho uses Foucault's model, perhaps more suitable in this instance, to discover her works' shifting meaning in that she examines the relationships of power to control.
A sign, a piece of female anatomy, is a manifested body that, in a classic linguistic Saussurian or arbitrary sense, is both signified and signifier and double-sided. For the sake of discussion, Cho's female shapes or signifiers will pair the conceptual or signified component with the real or signifier. But, unlike Saussure we will discuss the works in a real physical context. In other words, not only as interchangeable, but rather as contextually defined.
For many generations, women have had to struggle for power in a male-dominated- patriarchal world, finding it necessary to splinter or divide themselves between their careers and home life as wives and mothers. In a very real sense, this is the fragmentation seen in Cho's works, who, as an artist, needs to focus on her works, but as a mother, must care for her child. This split role of woman as mother, wife, daughter, and career woman was one of the inspirations behind this series of sculptures about the female.
Simultaneously, in a very real sense, through her subject, Cho references the Mother Goddess and nurturer, as evidenced in her Fragmentation #7. This monumental sculpture, executed in black lacquer with a negative cut-out of the female breasts in red, dwarfs the viewer and, in a way, forces her/him to acknowledge the import of the subject. A more playful sculpture is Fragmentation #4, in which many circles are repeated, representing a similar subject but which is reminiscent of Kandinsky's 1925 Several Circles.
Cho has engaged with abstraction for many years, utilizing circular forms in her past works. Consequently, it can be understood that this wall sculpture served as a segue to the current production with a similar theme. Cho's 3D and wall sculptures are made with very smooth surfaces that, like silk satin, flow red and black in their glistening texture.
Her color choices, red and black, are like two sides of a coin, and the color wheel in black is a mix of all colors that, to her, signifies death, and the red can signify both life and death. In Western thought, the female body is associated with the physical, and the male is associated with the spiritual. Anything to do with the earth is associated with the mother principle, and mythology has associated anything to do with the sky, for example, Uranus, with the male.
The female breast has been the topic of fascination, sexual focus as well as a fetish by some. Hearkening back to Neolithic times at Catal Huyuk, 1960 excavations revealed that the shrine walls were decorated with female breasts. The breast motif has been interpreted by scholar Elizabeth Gould Davis as the object of worship and "instrument [s] of motherhood" along with the phallus.
However, she argued that after the patriarchal revolution, men appropriated the form, hence the form endowment with erotic significance. By associating the feminine with the earth or body, women are subordinated and given negative meaning, deeming them property and objectifying them as exchangeable commodities, as seen in fashion, diet, cosmetic surgery, etc.
Cho's depictions of female breasts are as much a statement about female independence as they are about enriching society. In this series, she is celebrating the female while calling for the world to rid itself of such binary oppositions and dichotomies in order to acknowledge the complexity of the female.




















































