The art of Cho Duck Hyun is about history, nostalgia, romance, identity, family and spirituality. Like many adventurous contemporary artists, he is not content to confine his activities to one medium, and has at various points in the course of his career made compelling work in the fields of painting, photography, performance art, and even earthworks. Furthermore he has adapted certain strategies and aesthetics of Western art without sacrificing his deep roots in Korean Culture.
For the projects know as <Entering Yiseoguk>, Cho created the remnants of an documentation for a mythical kingdom, a legendary culture guarded by packs of pointy-eared iron dogs ( in reality, the dogs are made of fiberglass and buried by the artist and his assistants then dug up as “performances pieces” at museums). No matter that this is a fairytale landscape, invented in photography and film, with the dogs serving as a metaphor for the traces of a nomadic society. As one curator has pointed out, Cho’s project is ‘about memory and what we forget, and the construction of history as layers of a narrative.”