ELLY CHO - Interview
Award-Winning Visual Artist & Filmmaker
Exploring the intersection of
nature, environment, and human behavior
across painting, film, and performance.
“The porous rock, shifting wind patterns, and seasonal changes — alongside the stark contrast between urban Seoul and Jeju’s elemental nature — left a strong imprint on how I understand memory.”
1. What early landscape or memory first shaped your way of seeing — and how does it continue to shape your ecological approach today?
I grew up moving between Seoul and various natural landscapes, but I was especially affected by the raw materiality of Jeju Island’s volcanic terrain. The porous rock, shifting wind patterns, and seasonal changes — alongside the stark contrast between urban Seoul and Jeju’s elemental nature — left a strong imprint on how I understand memory. For me, memory is not something stored, but something held in the body and land, expressed through material, movement, and visual narrative.
That early experience taught me to listen through texture, silence, and repetition — a way of seeing that continues to guide how I approach ecological fieldwork today.
“What’s most alive for me now is the possibility of working across these worlds — human, nonhuman, and algorithmic — to explore how memory, sensation, and intelligence might be reimagined together.”
2. Your work spans desert systems, coastal environments, pigment processes, and AI-generated imagery. What draws these worlds together for you?
I’m drawn to materials that carry memory — pigment, salt, breath — elements that feel alive and responsive. These landscapes, whether desert or coastal, feel like thresholds: they echo the body’s own cycles of erosion, rhythm, and transformation. I often approach these places as sensorial collaborators — spaces that move and hold memory in ways that go beyond language.
My previous film Climate Hybrids explored speculative ecosystems shaped by water, migration, and adaptation. That project deepened my interest in ecological storytelling through movement, mythology, and evolving species. In Desert Futures, I continue this thread by shifting focus to the desert — not as barren, but as a site of reimagination, where ecological time, human gesture, and machine perception begin to entangle.
Rather than separating technology and nature, I’m interested in how they might reflect each other. AI in my work doesn’t aim to simulate nature, but to echo it — to listen, respond, and perhaps absorb its rhythms. These connections are still evolving. What’s most alive for me now is the possibility of working across these worlds — human, nonhuman, and algorithmic — to explore how memory, sensation, and intelligence might be reimagined together.
“The choreography was born from both emotional memory and environmental tension — particularly the internal contradictions of being between fantasy and reality.”
3. How do you experience the relationship between ecological research and personal memory when you’re creating?
For me, ecological research is not just external — it becomes deeply embodied and personal. When I begin a project, I don’t separate scientific exploration from lived experience. I enter the landscape through touch, movement, and observation. The way pigment shifts in salt air, or how breath echoes in a cavernous space — these sensory cues often unlock memory.
In my work, personal memory doesn’t stay in the background — it becomes material. A gesture from childhood, a visual from a recurring dream, or the shape of breath under water might resurface and form the seed of a scene. In my silent film sum(Island), I explored themes of isolation and self-discovery through movement, drawing from my experiences living on islands like Jeju, Manhattan, and London. The choreography was born from both emotional memory and environmental tension — particularly the internal contradictions of being between fantasy and reality.
This process continued in Climate Hybrids, where I used AI and choreography to reimagine evolutionary futures. Though rooted in scientific dialogue about adaptation and climate change, the film was shaped by my bodily memory and cultural imagination. The dancers’ movements embodied hybrid species, but also mirrored psychological states, ancestral echoes, and speculative longing.
So for me, ecological research and memory co-create one another. Memory brings intimacy to data, and research lends form to memory. Together, they shape how I build visual worlds — fragmented, rhythmic, and responsive to the emotional life of both land and body.
“It’s not about simulating nature, but creating dialogues between material intelligence and digital perception — a space where pigments and code both carry memory.”
4. What does your working process feel like — the rhythms, cues, or sensory details that guide you?
When a new idea arrives, I often begin with painting — it’s how I first externalize a feeling or visual logic. Painting becomes a way of thinking through form, and during the development of a body of work, it grows alongside the film. I think of it almost like set design or scenography in dialogue with narrative: a conversation between pigment and memory, between material and moving image.
My process is intuitive, rhythmic, and often physical. I work through movement, pigment, and listening — not only to sound, but to how materials behave. I might begin by walking a
coastline, collecting soil or color, observing how it reacts to light or water. These gestures accumulate into layered forms: performance, image-making, and sound.
I think of it as a kind of ecological choreography — not imposed, but responsive.
At the same time, my practice is evolving to include collaborations that translate these sensory experiences into other languages — ones that are not strictly visual or verbal. I’m working with systems that interpret memory, breath, and rhythm through computational means — using tools that mirror how the body feels, rather than just how it appears.
This allows the work to exist in dual dimensions: tactile and algorithmic, grounded and speculative. It’s not about simulating nature, but creating dialogues between material intelligence and digital perception — a space where pigments and code both carry memory.
“This translation between lived experience and speculative space is central to how I work.”
5. Many of your pieces move through dreamlike cultural landscapes. What draws you to these liminal spaces?
I’m drawn to places that hold emotional memory from my life — Seoul, Jeju Island, London, and New York. These locations shape how I perceive space and time. My work often reflects moments of personal significance, but those memories take on a dreamlike quality — layered with desire, imagination, and the unconscious.
This translation between lived experience and speculative space is central to how I work. I’m interested in environments where memory, loss, and transformation coexist — where what’s visible is shaped by what’s absent. In upcoming projects, I explore landscapes like abandoned architectures, submerged coasts, and desert ruins — places that feel suspended between histories.
These in-between zones allow the poetic and political to converge. They’re fragile, haunting, and speculative — and that’s where I feel most connected creatively.
“What feels most urgent is reclaiming how we store and transmit memory — especially in a time of ecological crisis and AI acceleration. I’m interested in what it means to create an alternative dataset — not based on surveillance or optimization, but on pigment, breath, and ecological rhythms.”
6. With upcoming projects exploring climate futures and hybrid ecologies, what feels most urgent or alive in this moment of your practice?
What feels most urgent is reclaiming how we store and transmit memory — especially in a time of ecological crisis and AI acceleration. I’m interested in what it means to create an alternative dataset — not based on surveillance or optimization, but on pigment, breath, and ecological rhythms. Desert Futures is my attempt to imagine a future in which land holds intelligence — where AI doesn’t overwrite memory, but listens to it. What feels alive now is the possibility of building systems of knowledge that are material, embodied, and deeply relational.
ELLY CHO
Visual Artist & Filmmaker
Interview
Land holds memory. The body listens.
https://www.ellycho.com/
https://www.instagram.com/choelly/
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