On a warm autumn day, Y.J. Cho sits near the sunny south window of her SoHo loft, elbows placed on the metal horizontal planks of what she calls “my torturing machine.” It’s a modified easel customized by a friend, according to Cho’s own design, to make bearable the long uninterrupted stretches of time this slight, almost fragile-looking woman spends painting. Beneath the menacing contraption stretches a primed canvas with pencil outlines suggesting the shapes of Cho’s next work.

At this moment however, Cho is not painting. She is reminiscing about first arriving in the United States from her native Taiwan in the mid-1970s. “I was so keen to come to New York, to study and to make art,” she tells me. Rolled up in her luggage were seven large oil color paintings called “The Banana Series.”
“People in Taiwan still remember them,” she says of the paintings, which traced the development of bananas from red palm flower, to a round bright-yellow bunch, and finally to a rotting mass. It represented her vision of “life, from birth to death,” but many thought she had picked the images to express feminist ideas, and the series inspired such controversy that it nearly threatened her entrance into an art contest. (She ended up winning the contest.)
Today, three of the biggest museums in Taiwan are bidding to buy the last couple of banana pictures Cho still owns. (She sold the rest to buy a camera while getting her Master’s degree.) She says, “I’ll wait until the price is high enough.”

Back in the present, Cho looks through the window, where a constant procession of pedestrians pass, five floors below, along Grand Street. “We have this joke we make,” she says, gesturing in the direction from which bustling sounds below are faintly audible, “‘if you throw a stone out of a window in SoHo, you’re gonna hit an artist on the head.’ That’s how many of us are here.”
A self-described photo-realist painter of the passage of time, Cho has adopted this artists’ mecca as her permanent soul residence. But she didn’t land in SoHo as a working artist with a gig in a gallery show.

For two years, Cho didn’t paint at all. She was living in Queens with her then-husband Keung Szeto, another painter whom she met at university in Taiwan. While he began “making his name” with his own photo-realistic style, she suspended her ambitions and started working as a retouching craftsperson in a photo shop. The job involved long hours of transferring colors on prints and smudging imperfections on the skins of advertising models. She shows some of her work from that time with pride rather than bitterness. “I was very skillful,” she says. Holding up two versions of an extreme close-up for a Lancome ad, she points, “Look at this face. Beautiful, but her skin was really bad. Everything had to be altered: the freckles, the wrinkles, the chicken skin around the eyes.”

When she and Szeto moved to Tribeca, Cho’s art career was about to find its direction. She saw an arresting door with peeling read paint and “had to take the camera and start working on it.” It was 1983, and her pent up creative energy set her on fire. The Soho gallery representing her husband—OK Harris, run by Ivan Karp, who is known for discovering Andy Warhol—agreed to take Cho’s paintings, but refused to give her a solo show. Despite the fact that her paintings sold, “It was always ‘no, no, no, Cho,” she remembers. Since her husband showed with them, they told her, “It’s never good business for a couple to show in the same place.”

While Karp’s son Ethan, the gallery’s current curator, continues to insist on this rule of thumb, OK Harris eventually broke the rules in 1986. It was so unexpected that Cho had already given up hope and committed to a show at the Schreiber/Cutler gallery. Cho went from no shows to a double exposition in a matter of months.
Sixteen years and six solo OK Harris shows later, she remembers the long wait. “Oh, I couldn’t talk to him, I was so angry,” Cho says of Ivan Karp with pursed lips. “I waited for five years for him to agree.”

Time is an ever-present theme running through Cho’s work. Her most recent works, the “Wall Diaries,” feature walls with crumbling bricks and spider-webs in the nooks, that look as if cut out from actual masonry. Onto the walls, Cho projects enigmatic shadows of trees, leaves, nearby sheds, hills and other not always distinguishable items. The paintings emerged from trips around the world—places along the Silk Route, the Pink City in India, Beijing, Bali, old quarters in Paris. Her earlier works featured a “Barn Series” from New England, and her first exhibition at OK Harris was a Lower East Side series filled with quaint corners and corroded fire escapes.

Infatuated with the idea of the transforming force of time, she has rendered the peeling paint of many a rusted neighborhood door in her signature style. “I just like the texture, the decay,” Cho says. “There’s beauty in that decay.”