Swarthmore College art student Miyuki Baker has created an awesome online resource for API LGBTQ folks.  Click here to read a recent interview about my work on their website.

I’ve been invited by the brilliant Katherine Sender to deliver an artist talk at UPENN’s Annenberg School of Communication tomorrow! I’ll be speaking on two of my shorts and also introducing the trailer for my new short film Golden, Golden (2012).

Erica Cho: Queer Film Art
November 2, 12.15-1.45
Annenberg School for Communication, room 108
University of Pennsylvania
Further information: Katherine Sender ksender@asc.upenn.edu

Erica Cho, visiting professor at Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore will be visiting Penn to show and discuss two of her films:

“We Got Moves You Ain’t Even Heard Of (Part 1)” (1999/Beta/USA/10:50 min). Obsessed with eighties teen heartthrob Ralph Maccio, aka The Karate Kid, a young Korean American takes a journey into Macchio’s pin-up androgyny and Hollywood’s All-American underdog fantasies.

“School Boy Art” (2004 / Super-8 / USA / 10:50 min.) Franz’s dream is to attend a real art school. He draws religiously and packs his sketchbook with anatomy studies in preparation for Portfolio Day. Will the inscrutable Professor pass or fail him? Featuring the high school sketchbooks of artist Mario Ybarra, Jr. and original music by D’Argento (artist Anna Sew Hoy & musician Giles Miller) SCHOOL BOY ART has contributed to the intersecting discourses on race, gender, sexuality, desire, and performance.

Colloquium in Visual Culture: “Beautiful Stories: The Video Art of Erica Cho” 

“Carrie Paterson is an artist and writer whose work crosses interdisciplinary boundaries between the arts and sciences, and between object making, performance, drawing, research, invention, and text. Since 2002 she has been investigating the cultural and scientific discourses surrounding the exploration of outer space, and most recently, collaborating with scientists to visualize alternate models of evolution and sensory perception.”

I met Carrie Paterson 12 years ago when we were both students in UC Irvine’s MFA program, but after graduating, we lost touch, only bumping into each other in odd places and times, like in line to vote for a local election in Silverlake. In 2008 I was mesmerized by her Copernican-inspired sculpture STRANGE ATTRACTOR, a nine-layer perfume bottle with original scents magically encased in concentric glass orbs. The scent “Kemmer” referenced Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction classic THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, which compelled me to reach out to Carrie. Since then we’ve become friends, engaging in hearty conversations on space, science, love, consciousness, magic, healing, tarot, games, comix, and why the heck art is so important. Visit cpworks.org/​Strange_Attractor/​index.html to see beautiful gallery images of her sculpture.

This video is part of a series of short portraits of artists in my life, tailor-made for my students at Bryn Mawr College as a way to teach community.

Festival Programming Director Abe Ferrer and I co-curated a cute LGBT shorts program for Visual Communications‘ Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival. BUY tix today, spread the word, and hope to see you there. Work by Jenny Lin, Shawn Tamarabuchi, Yvette Choy, among others.  

“What do you get when Festival co-director Abraham Ferrer and veteran video artist Erica Cho get together to assemble an LGBT shorts program? We get proto-queer lipstick traces in a Koreatown mall, a paranoid straight girl pulling a Jenny Schechter on her fiancé’s ex, bad twincestuous break-up sex, a kidnapped dominatrix, and of course coming-of-age, coming out stories featuring cute, queer, teens-of-color. Climb out of the covers, part-time lovers, and enjoy this awesome mix of shorts!”

— Erica Cho, Abraham Ferrer

Published in the zine Femme Flicke, issue #7, 1997.

Femme Flicke, an important zine on women and film edited by Tina Spangler in the 1990s, is included in the Sarah Wood Zine Collection at Duke University Library and in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. Issues 2, 5, and 7 are in the collection of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.

For an enlarged view, click here.

Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the Forgotten War will be on exhibit at New York University.

Opening reception: April 7, 6-8 pm.
Exhibition talk: April 23, 6:00 pm.

To RSVP, click here.

New York University
41-51 East 11th Street, 7th floor
NY NY 10003
Open 10-6 M-F

“And don’t think it hasn’t been a little slice of heaven…’cause it hasn’t.” - Bugs Bunny

MONSTER is a temporary, site-specific video installation exhibited on the first night of the sun in Scorpio, a week before Halloween, on October 24, 2009 inside a Los Angeles residence snugly situated within the central neighborhood of Historic Filipinotown (Hi-Fi) during the after-party of You Gave Me Brave, an Artist Curated Project group show at S1F Gallery envisioned by Young Chung.

MONSTER is made up of two parts: a looping video with sound projected along the walls of a long, dark hallway leading to a green-tiled bathroom. Inside the bathroom another video with sound loops: this time on a tiny TV monitor set amongst perfumey powder room objects. Both found footage video are derived from a 1946 Warner Bros. Merry Melodies cartoon, “Hair-Raising Hare,” directed by Mel Blanc and written by Tedd Pierce, with stunning background art created by Robert Gribbroek. In the story a Rita Hayworth-like wind-up toy rabbit lures Bugs Bunny into the castle of a Peter Lorre-like evil scientist who desires to feed Bugs to a hairy, red-orange, sneaker-wearing, tooth-(or heart-?)shaped monster named Gossamer.

Broadcast for decades long after they were first released, Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoons were presented on television alongside contemporary animated programming for children into the 1990s, before they were packaged as classics in the 2000s. This video installation explores how American animation from the 1930s-1940s play a large role in children’s absorption of the narratives, characters, and erotic fantasies of classic Hollywood cinema and how animated representations of architecture and space in these cartoons contribute to the construction of an imaginary Los Angeles.

MONSTER has multiple inspirations. First, it is a response to the space itself. The building, a Spanish-style adobe apartment complex built between the 1930s and 40s, carries that Old Hollywood spirit unique to this period and style of architecture, structures that conjure for me ghostly screen memories of those sad characters and the homes they lived in, or couldn’t afford to live in, which together become my imagined history of LA and part of its haunted mythology: Joe Gilles’ Hollywood apartment at the Alto Nido in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950); even Joe’s leaky temporary room above Norma Desmond’s garage; Dixon Steele’s flat situated at a lower level to his female lover’s abode in Nicholas Ray’s film In a Lonely Place (1950).

The one-bedroom apartment is also the home of a friend known as Free Spirit, a long-time LA resident, fierce activist, and devoted collector of “Gen-X Punk & Queer Punk” art. Free Spirit shares the home with Boo Boo and Woo Woo, two black cats who terrorize guests by hiding under a small telephone desk unit original to the apartment design, built into the wall at the mid-point of the 25-foot long hallway. When visitors need to use the bathroom, they must brave the strange, narrow tunnel with high-curved ceilings, where hissing shadowy forms leap out of the darkness to slash timid ankles. The long hallway, the little monsters in the dark, the fear of having to use the bathroom at all, together with the screen ghosts haunting the architecture led to the making of MONSTER.

To learn more about this project, visit:
wegotmoves.com/​projects/​monster.html

This Time I Didn’t Look For Sex

Your knuckles: bruised, squared, splayed, doubled-jointed-
Remind me of my girl cousin
When we were raggedy kids in Philly,
And scaling linen closets like monkeys.
Today she’s married to a white guy with two sons.

Your gums: bruised, pointy, resilient, hops-drunk-
Are shadows of my boy cousin
At a fancy doughnut shop in Seoul,
Speaking thick, jazz poet Korean.
He’s engaged to a Korean girl for the second time.

On March 10 I leaned into another.
I pressed her hands, then kissed her mouth.
I fogged my eyes to any shade of bruise, and wondered,
“Do the dead communicate with the living?”

The death of my own magic is missing you.

I made the above video (click on the image) as part of VC Super-Collider, a video mash-up organized by Visual Communications in support of Tuesday Night Project’s 11th Anniversary TN PARTY on Saturday, July 31, 2010. Each artist was asked to make a 60-second SD video with no sound. Together the video mashup was projected by a VJ/DJ as people danced the night away at the JACCC Noguchi Plaza.

The artists involved were Matthew Abaya, Huy Chheng, Erica Cho, Mar Elepano, Wilfred Galila, Junko Goda, James Herr, toNY toKA, Leslie Ito, Robbie Chihwen Lo, Walt Louie, Christen Marquez, Maaya Miura, Sean Miura, Amir Motlagh, Alex Munoz, Joel Quizon, John Raposas, Koji Sakai, Mina Son, Steven Wong, and Christopher Woon.

Visual Communications, also known as VC, has a tender place in my heart. My 2nd video We Got Moves You Ain’t Even Heard Of (Part One) screened at their festival way back in ‘99.  And this year I was invited to curate a LGBT shorts program for the same festival, which takes place April 28-May 7, 2011. We haven’t announced the festival lineup yet, but please mark these dates on your calendar - and hope to see you there!