Izzy Cho Interview - Magazine TM

Full interview transcript below

Photograph by Dane Thomas

Charming Geometry

Magazine TM Interview with Izzy Cho

My name is Izzy. Izzy Cho, my pronouns are she, her. I got my undergraduate degree at University of Oregon, I got my graduate degree at SAIC in print media.

I call myself a charm maker in Chicago. A lot of my work is based in physical manifestations of good luck in my Korean American background.

We are currently in my studio, and I actually share it with somebody else. It’s the size of like a storage closet. It’s not very big, but we make do. It really works for us right now. Yeah, I’m just trying to cook in here when I can.

Illustration has always kind of won my heart. When I first started pursuing art seriously, quote unquote, it was to be an illustrator. Animation was a big part of my childhood growing up. Manga was also a big part of it as well. Even when I kind of diverged from communication and design, I’ve always gravitated towards the illustrative. Then finding that balance between illustration and icon and abstraction. I feel like I’m always kind of balancing those three things kind of manifested in a lot of the shapes, the colors and the forms that I use.

In balancing these in the way like, I want this to look cute but not too cutesy and also a little realistic but I also want it to be ambiguous and always kind of playing around with that. Hopefully manifested in something distinct, I guess.

Definitely a lot of Hayao Miyazaki was pretty formative.

I could go off about him and yeah, his career. I feel like Miyazaki was a big influence. I’ve been kind of revisiting a lot of the sub genre of magical school girl anime. I watched this one called Cardcaptor Sakura a lot. Not only visually, but also the themes about girlhood, mundane magic, coming of age and like ideas of love, but also as a concept of like, cultural capital, like thinking of anime as cultural capital and like transnational media. I feel like now for me in a more personal context and a Korean context, thinking about the pop cultural rise of Korean media too, and how that becomes currency, I guess.

Pachinko, yeah, is… very transparently based on this book that came out called Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Lee Min Jin.

I learned that a lot of Koreans, when they were occupied, had actually taken care of pachinko parlors. That was how they kind of got by and were able to assimilate.

That really struck me and I was also thinking about my practice in general, even before reading this book. It is a lot about luck, chance, and traditional systems of luck and how holding on to luck and superstition is a sign of generational persistence. I was also fascinated in that realm, but also fascinated in the gamification of it as well.

You have what they describe in the book as these little pegs and the owners of the parlor actually would every once in a while, like kind of subtly knock the pegs one way or another with a hammer to kind of adjust, I guess, the success rate or just change it up a little bit.

A little bit, a little bit, but not in a malicious way or kind of like an illegal way, but just as a way to maintain the balance, I guess, as they own the parlor. When I was first doing it, I was actually looking at Pachinko designs and they have like a set visual way of how the nails curve.

So I started to look at how they visually did that with the pachinko parlors and then incorporated my iconography of good luck. Persimmons were a thing. I reference a good luck dream that my mom had and kind of incorporating that iconography with the pachinko and that setup. So that’s kind of how this body of work is developing and it’s still transforming. I’m adding to it and I’m having a lot of fun with it.

My first memory with pinball is probably from the early Microsoft version, you know what I mean? Like the one that comes with it.

For the bigger ones, the outlines, I did CNC machine, but in my own practice, I use a laser cutter quite a bit.

While I was at SAIC, I really took advantage of the laser cutter there because I knew I was not going to be able to find this easily anywhere else. To be honest, drawing kind of scares me. Showing my hand sometimes scares me. Mark making, I haven’t really found a way to utilize that naturally. So using the laser cutter was a way for me to try and make patterns and draw, but also kind of take myself out of it a little bit.

When I draw digitally, for better or for worse, I tend to like to simplify things and abstract things and think about pattern and textile. So the laser cutter helped me think about pattern and repetition and still make and not be so frozen in my image making. So I really kind of leaned into that. For the pachinko pieces in terms of material, I feel like the MDF that I had used a lot, it was more thinking about what I could carry actually, that actually is something that stops me or something I have to think about because I’m a very tiny person who’s not very strong. If I don’t have the help of other people, what can I actually make and carry myself? So the MDF was more of a strategic choice. I’ve been leaning into combining acrylic and Hanji or really leaning into acrylic, thinking about...

Hanji, Hanji is Korean mulberry paper, and it has a long genealogy. It’s pretty traditional. So I liked, I mean, it’s a little binary, but using this traditional motif of Hanji and then also incorporating acrylic and thinking about not necessarily tradition versus contemporary, but how tradition and cultural specificity and things exist because of commodity and exist because they have been, you know, able to be capitalized and still be aestheticized and designed.

So at the moment, I don’t. But I should because these things are very fragile. These pieces to verbally say it because you know on a podcast talking about a visual medium I have these nails I nailed them in the MDF and they have an acrylic um nail head I like to call it but it’s just like a kind of acrylic piece there and these designs and they’re like super glued on top and the nails are just like kind of permanently in the MDF but I think in the future what would be really helpful for me and for people installing the work is to maybe have them be actual pegs that you could take out, and then nail them, and then put them back in, and then maybe I can make a diagram. So it’s almost like they’re assembling a Lego, which to me sounds fun, but I know would probably be a pain in the ass for the gallery people. But it sounds like a good logistical thing.

Recently, I’ve been really into Minju Kim or Kim Minju. She is a fashion designer. She competed in Next in Fashion on Netflix. So if you want to check that out if you want, it’s really fun. Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot. That’s how I found her work but I actually look whenever I’m stuck I look at her collections and again. I love fashion and it’s a really good point for me to reference because it’s that whole thing about combining icon, texture, and it has to be almost sculptural by design because it has to be on the body. And then you’re making a collection, right? So you have this extensive series basically, like bodies of work, and they have such a big range, but they’re still cohesive. I don’t know, it’s really a very good shortcut for me and I’ve been really enchanted by her use of like shape. Actually, I’m going to be embarrassed because I feel like people are gonna look her up and they’re gonna be like, oh, maybe a little too, referencing too much of her work or something. But yeah, just, I’m really enjoying how she does things.

I’m always going back to... I always have to name drop her. Charlene Liu, who I studied with when I was an undergrad. She was head of the print department at U of O. She let me studio-assist for her, which was very generous, because I was very green. But a lot of the language and process, colors. A lot of things that I use today are really because of her and her guidance I’ve been kind of less explicit about this over the years, but definitely my mom and my sister always have a hand in what I make. It’s very, sometimes it’s very outward, but sometimes they’ll just have a phone call and I’ll have a phone call with them and something that they say will really spark something and become like a conceptual backbone for what I make. One time my sister went to Hawaii and she got me a pack of candies. She’s like, “these made me think of you”. I don’t remember what they’re called, but they were like these hard candies and they were circular and they were each colorful. But they came in a... Oh, I should show you. Hold on. They came in an iridescent packaging. This is really bad for podcasts, but good for video. Do you see this guy right here? Yeah. So she had this whole bag of them for me. And… I became so enchanted with them as an object. I bought iridescent paper. But then it also got me thinking of gift giving even more and the generosity of my family and whether that’s cultural.

Something that other people have said to me, but I have, and it makes sense, but I have been recycling a lot of shapes. So I think maybe a trademark, okay, good for video, bad for podcasts, but like this clover shape that I’ve been using a lot has been, excuse me, I just bumped the mic, has been like a go-to of mine.

It’s just like a four petaled flower, but I’ve shown it every single place I’ve been to for the past two years now at this point. Yeah, the geometry of it, and it also symbolizes my reliance on multiple metaphors, because it’s like a flower, it’s like a clover, it’s like the top of a persimmon. I’ve referenced this a bunch. I, you know, I’m very flattered, but I did this. I was invited to do an outdoor installation at scaffold and I was kind of using these shapes, but also making other shapes that were kind of similar to this. And I had people text me and they were like “do you have work outside at scaffold?” Yeah, that’s cool. It’s a very basic shape, but yeah, I don’t know, I’m glad people are clocking it.