Yoon Cho
yooncho.com
I am interested in the process of creating identity and the ephemeral human nature that is constantly evolving and changing. My themes focus on the loss of and search for identity, the conflicts that occur when building a new identity, and conforming to social surroundings. The performance captured in my work is the result of my experiences in these social and physical surroundings.
still 1 from Haircut video
Hair is a performance project of video and photo installation. The haircut reflects the assimilation of individual identity into that of the marriage.
View Haircut video here
The juxtaposed videos show myself having a long shoulder length hair cut down to the same length of hair as my husband’s
still 2 from Haircut video
still 3 from Haircut video
Haircut, 2007, video, 3min 33sec
photographs of getting haircuts and hair from Yoon Cho and her husband in the shadow boxes
Hair in the box, ©2007, 11 3/4″ x 14 3/4″ x 2 7/8″ (for each panel)
Hi Yoon,
Thanks for posting about your work. I’m curious whether you perceived your haircuts as a personal ritual or a private symbolism that marked your mutual assimilation into marriage, or whether it was intended as a more public statement about marriage? In other words, is it a gesture that you intended for others to receive, or is it a symbolic gesture between you and your husband? Of course, these are not mutually exclusive!
Hi Susan,
Thank you for posing the question.
Of course, much of my view of the world is obtained through my personal experience and observations from others. The ritual of my husband and I getting haircuts was used as a symbolic act of the constant transformation of the individuality in a marriage.
On a personal note, the courtship before our marriage was relatively short. By marrying my husband, I had to relocate from New York to Texas. I felt that I was making a lot of compromises to form a marriage. Once we got married, we had to make a lot of adjustments and had to overcome the differences and reinvent what kind of lives we wanted for our future so that we can be on the same page in a unit of marriage.
At the time, I was thinking a lot about how individual’s identity changes with marriage. There were quite a few of my female friends who got married and a lot of them were dealing with the issue of changing their last names – luckily I didn’t go through this problem since I married a man who had the same last name. In general, I saw greater changes in women in their identities upon their marriage. The length of my (or a woman’s) hair being cut denotes the amount of effort and compromises made in the union.