BUILDING EMOTIONS

Byoung Soo Cho, a co-curator at this year’s Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, takes Tatler on a trip down memory lane as he recounts his journey towards becoming an acclaimed architect—and how he rediscovered his passion for painting along the way

- Nina Milhaud

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 co-curator.

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.