Cha Jongrye works with wood, for it is soft and warm. She puts his mind into wood, for it gently receives her gestures and breaths as they are, irrespective of its disposition, or even when it is exceptionally as hard as stone. The artist keeps on talking with it in this or that way in which big or small wood lumps meet one another and small similar pieces are linked one by one. She sometimes moves her body and soul to delve into it to look for forms and other times, speaks to it to draw them out. By carefully knocking and carving, she awakes nature as well as herself and by uniting wooden slivers together and grinding them, she weaves a rug of simple landscapes of our lives. Her works, thus, could be in themselves all things in nature viewed from the far end of the sky. Or, they could be also a reflection of the inner rhythms of nature, which remain eternally invisible to our eyes.

Tcheon-nahm PARK (Chief Curator, Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul, Korea)