The director of this year’s urban space-focused exhibition in Seoul, South Korea, shares his journey of becoming an acclaimed architect—and how he rediscovered his passion for painting along the way
On a sunny autumn day in 1971, a 14-year-old Byoung Soo Cho carried his friend’s mother’s coffin up a mountain in Seoul’s northern highlands. As the procession arrived at the burial site, he gazed at the hole carved out in the earth. It was a clean, rectangular shape, about two metres long, one metre wide and one-and-a-half metre deep, sharply cut out in the red, clay-like soil. Slowly, the coffin was lowered into the ground, hung from two long pieces of white fabric, perfectly filling the shape of the void.
The beauty of that image—the clean-cut hole gaping in the blushing earth, beneath the vivid blue sky—never left Cho. From this memory grew a fascination for the earth. Fifty-two years later, Cho drew from that memory and created Void in Earth, an installation on display this year as part of Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2023, of which he is a director.
In case you missed it: Grammy award-winning musician Dana Leong on pushing creative boundaries
Born in 1957, Cho grew up in the lush and hilly area of northern Seoul, bordering the city’s highest mountain, Bukhansan. Raised by a family of engineers and architects, he enjoyed painting and drawing from a young age and nurtured a keen curiosity for the landscape that surrounded him. In his early twenties, he moved to the US to study architecture at Montana State University, in the small mountain city of Bozeman.
While growing up close to nature influenced Cho in a way that came to define his identity and vision, reading certain books while he was a student—including What Is Man? by Mark Twain and Tao Te Ching, one of the foundational texts for Taoism—played a key role in how he developed his ideas, and in particular, his exploration of human nature, emotions and intuition.
“In the late Seventies and early Eighties, modern architecture was criticised for being very cold and rational. Everything was explained in such a logical, rational way,” recalls Cho. “But the emotional aspect was missing. For me, emotions, love and spontaneity were very powerful things to explore. And so I became fascinated by the intuitive aspect of architecture.”
A few years later, Cho completed a master’s degree at Harvard University and started to develop his own architectural ideas. He was drawn to the simple forms of barns and warehouses, made with brick, rock or wood, which he encountered in Montana, and to the mundanity and emptiness characteristic of Korean traditional architecture. Most of all, Cho came back to what was elementary to him, like his relationship with nature and the philosophy of Taoism.
