Interview: Woohee Cho

On November 1, artist Woohee Cho presented How to Drive Home, a multi-layered performance staged at Koreatown Plaza, a major hub in Los Angeles that has served the Korean and Korean American community since 1988. The performance traced the housing histories of Cho’s two former roommates, Jisoo Chung and jinseok choi—fellow Korean artists currently based in Los Angeles. To produce the score for the musical performance, the artist drove with each of the roommates to their former residences, interviewing them along the way. These conversations were recorded, and Cho worked with two musicians to transform this recorded material into a loosely structured musical score.

Woohee grew up with art and creativity around him, but was encouraged to pursue a more practical career trajectory. So as an undergrad, he studied graphic design at Seoul National University in South Korea—while taking as many fine arts classes as possible.

Because of his interest in American art history and experimental art, Woohee knew he wanted to move to the U.S. after graduating. Living as a queer artist in South Korea, he shared, was also difficult. In 2018, he moved to Los Angeles to study at CalArts, where he connected with other Korean artists.

He has lived in his Koreatown apartment for the past six years, a space he originally found with fellow students Jisoo and Minsu. During the pandemic, jin moved in, and the household became one of support and connection. They often walked to the grocery store and cooked together. This sense of shared experience was a central theme of How to Drive Home: the performance portrayed the artists’ diasporic journeys and the precarity that comes with navigating the process of finding a sense of belonging in Los Angeles. The performance was woven through with moments of anxiety, uncertainty and harsh realities, but also humor and playfulness.

Alongside Woohee, How to Drive Home featured performers Coffee Kang, gamin, and Kai-Luen Liang, with movement consulting by Mao. The performance was followed by a conversation with Woohee and playwright Sarah Cho, co-presented with GYOPO.

I sat down with Woohee at Koreatown Plaza to discuss the many layers of the project, and how he approaches performance and collaboration.

Eva Recinos: During the talk after the performance, you mentioned that in working with LAND, you realized that this was going to become a public performance. While the audience watched, you could also see people who didn’t know about the project walking around; or you could hear the grocery carts at H-Mart in the background. How did the project evolve when you considered that it was going to be in this very public space?

Woohee Cho: That was the biggest thing I considered when I made this work—the public part. Because my artworks are often driven by conceptual practice, or research. I know conceptual art can feel quite inaccessible. Creating layers in work is really fun, but that can make it harder for an artwork to speak to a larger group of audience. So I was in a kind of identity crisis—like, wait, was my work elitist?

ER: In your previous work?

WC: Yeah, or, just the way I’m working. I often think of art-making as creating a maze where people can roam around and figure out what this is about. Also, I just have a lot of text, or subtext that I want to put. Part of that might be because I want to create a space for my own voice. But this multi-layered text and subtext maze might lead to not letting people in.

ER: Right. I hear you.

WC: That was the biggest prompt for me while working on How to Drive Home. I wanted it to be as friendly as possible. I wanted to be explaining the work. I wanted it to offer easier access than in my previous work. Instead of complicating, complicating, complicating.

I was thinking: If my mom or my dad just randomly saw this piece on the way to H Mart, would they get what I'm trying to say? That was something I kept in my mind. So when writing a script and a narration, I wanted to be clear and direct, and tell the story rather than complicating it or being subtle.

ER: That's so interesting - it’s about having multiple entry points for people. In rehearsals, was that something that you discussed with the collaborators?

WC: Because it's a public space and people can come and go, I wanted the structure to repeat. So that during whichever point they started seeing it, it made sense. Let’s say, they only see act one, chapter three and then leave—I still want them to have something.

ER: It's a little bit more contained.

WC: Yeah, each chapter in act one has its own start and the end. Act one is the one I wanted to make easier for people. I asked the musicians to be more melodic and friendly in act one. Because I knew I wanted act two to be weird, messy, and more experimental.

ER: It’s interesting that people were also watching from different floors of the mall, which I think is unique. When you go to a performance, normally you stay wherever you sit. You can't choose to change seats or sit on the stage.

WC: To me, that was the most beautiful part about this public performance. Because I couldn't control where the audience would be. It is more fun that they could choose where they wanted to be.

ER: And parts of it were really interactive, too. You would hand us objects, or Coffee would hand us the microphone to hold. Tell me about how you all decided to include those elements, too.

WC: That’s something I'm interested in when I make a performance piece. In performance, I cannot stop thinking about the stage—how to decentralize the stage, and how to use the stage non-conventionally.

One of the major issues about my art practice is, how can I queer societal norms? And what's my way of queering? That also applies to the stage. The conventional stage is something hierarchical. It has physical divisions such as elevation and lighting. It has to be separate from the audience. I think those separations and the hierarchical system is effective, but it also creates a lot of problems. And that’s really mirrored with what's happening in the real world. So I always think about: How can I play with the structure of the stage, per se?

Audience engagement is in relation to that for sure. I wanted to blur the boundary between the audience and the performer. That's why I dragged their seats into the middle of the stage.

ER: I was going to say: And then you dragged them in there!

WC: We were debating, should we put them back or leave them? And I was like, let's just see what happens.

ER: I was actually wondering if some of them were going to move themselves back, but they all stayed.

WC: Yeah, I thought they were going to move back, but they just stayed. [laughs] And there’s the upstairs, too. In act two, I went two stories up and down, screaming toward the original stage. That makes people think, “Oh, that's also part of the stage.” So the idea of stage is broadened over time and blurred by our action and performing.

ER: Was there anything that surprised you during the performance? Anything people did or anything that maybe you and Coffee did?

WC: I think every moment was surprising and very enjoyable for me. [laughs] The quickest response is—I didn't think people would be up here, on the second floor. I thought most people would be downstairs. Lots of people were up here watching, which I loved. I was only planning to scream on the first floor, but then there were a lot of people up here, so I thought it would make sense to go up higher. I had to run a lot because the elevator didn't work. [laughs]

That was a surprise. Also, I looked through the audience’s eyes while performing, and they were really focused. That energy felt really great.

Coffee, Kai-Luen, and gamin’s performance was surprising too—how amazing they all were! Coffee, she really took the stage when she did the air guitar next to Kai-Luen. And when she was screaming and acting in act two, she really went for it. Kai-Luen took care of all the musical parts, making (dis)harmony with movements.

Oh, and the video installation was surprising. I did a lot of test runs in here but I never got to do the rehearsal while the video was up. Looking at the videos and photos of the performance, it looks really great.

ER: You mentioned that there was a score, but there was also room for improvisation in the music. It was so interesting to see you moving and then see what the musicians were playing. Sometimes they were playing the instruments in a really direct way. Sometimes they were dragging things along the guitar strings. With you and Coffee, was there also improvisation in your movements?

WC: We made the music first from the interview narrative. So I played with the music, and I tried to find the movement. Then I started to get a sense of which objects I wanted to use in certain chapters. I thought: “Oh, maybe washing the bowl should go in the language barrier chapter, and cutting boards and dishes might fit with the bittersweet love chapter.” The music inspired me to have those drafts of the movement. And then from there, we started to fine-tune movements.I worked with Mao, who is a choreographer, performer, and visual artist. She helped me figure out the movement. So the three of us—me, Coffee and Mao—talked through each chapter, creating a loose score. Having rehearsals and reviewing rehearsal footage definitely helped me figure out what I wanted.

ER: Was it surreal to be performing in this space? Did you ever think, “One day, I'm going to do a performance in Koreatown Plaza?”

WC: No. [laughs] It was really hard to find a place. Literally, Irina and Bryan helped me a lot with that. I almost gave up, because no malls in Koreatown wanted to do it.

ER: But you knew you wanted to do it at a mall?

WC: First, I wanted to do it in Koreatown, and then I knew I wanted to do something with food, like a grocery store or a restaurant nearby. So I just knocked on doors, at different malls… This mall, Koreatown Plaza, was really supportive. They liked my proposal.

And they have this three-story tall LED screen so now I had another prompt: What do I do with this giant LED screen? I can’t just not use it. Now that I’m saying it, it seems like, in this work, there were a lot of parts that I couldn't control. It’s because of the public space with the general public and also because I was working with a lot of collaborators. It was a process of letting go of things.

The day of, I remember thinking: “Wow, what am I doing here? In this mall with so many families? In front of Korean grandpas and grandmas?” [laughs] Honestly, I'm really grateful to LAND, the Mohn Grant and GYOPO—that they trusted me. Because it's a live performance, they don't know what it's going to be. Even though they could read the script—what if I'm bad? Or what if it is just bad art? [laughs]

ER: Do you feel like receiving the grant gave you a little bit of freedom to work out what you wanted the project to look like?

WC: It gave me room to think about public art. Because artists are living in the real world—we need to think a lot more about the real world and the general public, not just our specific audience.

Because of this grant, I was able to create this body of work. Now that I have the structure and the work, I’m thinking about the next step. I can see this project being an installation with objects and sound, like I initially imagined. I can also think about my other two roommates who are not included in this iteration of the project, and how I want to incorporate their stories. Do I want to perform this piece in a different place in a different city? Do I want to create a new iteration in Seoul?

This work aims to archive our lives. So if we say performance is about ephemera, I thought this relationship was really interesting because archiving and performance are almost opposites.

ER: Right. A performance often only happens once and that’s it.

WC: I wanted to archive these stories, but I also wanted it to be ephemeral. I need to think about that more.

The other thing is I thought that this process was interesting: doing the interviews first and then translating them into the music. And then I reacted to that music to make a movement. Those three steps of interpreting those narratives were really interesting.

Photos by Gina Clyne.