Hyun ah cho biography

2014 incident on a Korean Air aircraft

The nut rage incident, colloquially referred to as "nutgate", (Korean: 땅콩 회항, Ttangkong hoehang) was an air rage incident that occurred on December 5, 2014, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City onboard Korean Air Flight 086. Heather Cho (Korean name: Cho Hyun-ah; later changed to Cho Seung-yeon), Korean Air vice president and daughter of Korean Air CEO Cho Yang-ho, dissatisfied with the way a flight attendant served nuts on the plane, ordered the aircraft to return to the gate before takeoff.

All first class passengers, including Cho, were given nuts bagged in their original packaging—in keeping with the airline's procedures; however, Cho had expected them to be served on a plate in first class. She questioned the cabin crew chief about the standard procedure of serving the nuts. After a heated confrontation, Cho assaulted him and ordered him off the plane, requiring a return to the gate and delaying the flight about 20 minutes.

When the incident became public, Cho and Korean Air were heavily criticized, and in the aftermath, Cho resigned from one of her several executive positions at Korean Air. She was subsequently found guilty in a South Korean court of obstructing aviation safety and given a twelve-month prison sentence, of which she served five months. The flight attendant and cabin crew chief had returned to their positions by April 2016.

Initial incident and official report

On December 5, 2014, Heather Cho (Korean name: Cho Hyun-ah; Korean: 조현아), a businesswoman and daughter of the then Korean Air chairman and CEO, Cho Yang-ho, boarded Korean Air Flight 086 registered as HL7627 at John F. Kennedy International Airport, destined for Incheon International Airport in Seoul. Prior to takeoff, she was served macadamia nuts in a closed bag rather than on a plate.

Upon being se

She was a princess who dreamed only of becoming a classical harpist. Instead, her ruthless tycoon of a father packed her off to America to study hotel administration, before forcing her to join the dull, if vastly lucrative, family business.

If that sounds like a hackneyed Disney plot, it’s perfectly possible that this poor-little-rich-girl version of the Cho Hyun-ah story currently doing the rounds is nothing more than PR fiction, manufactured to generate public sympathy for a spoiled-brat South Korean princess who fell from grace. If so, it isn’t ­working.

To be fair to Cho Hyun-ah, when you’ve grown up having everything handed to you on a plate, being offered your free nuts in a bag in the first-class section of an aircraft owned by your daddy’s airline must come as something of a traumatic shock.

That, however, hardly excused the scene that followed on board Korean Air Flight KE086 on December 5 as the crew prepared to take off from the John F Kennedy airport in New York, bound for Seoul.

Cho, the eldest daughter of Korean Air Lines chair Cho Yang-ho and a KAL executive in her own right, took one look at the unplated macadamias and – under the circumstances, there’s only one word for it – went nuts.

According to multiple reports in the South Korean media, repeated this week in court, she publicly humiliated both the female flight attendant who had so brazenly breached the company’s first-class snack-serving protocol, and the chief steward responsible for her.

Worse, she became so incensed when Park Chang-jin was unable to immediately produce the service manual that she ordered him off the aircraft.

There was only one problem. The aircraft had already been pushed back from the gate and was lining up for take off.

Actually, for Cho, that was not a problem – she ordered the pilots to return the aircraft to the gate, which they did, leaving the 250 fare-paying passengers on board to wonder if KAL rea

Eleonora Reffo: This “Studio Visit” format aims to investigate the poetics of artists in relation to their production space. You’ve lived between South Korea, Australia, New York. How has your biography been critical to your artistic research and your relationship to a possible work space?
Hyun Cho: I feel lucky to be able to operate internationally. I never wanted to own any specific culture. I’ve never wanted to belong any culture. Instead, I want my works to reflect that mixed experience. It’s been a dynamic journey. It’s challenging to manage working in new environments but this is critical to my practice.

E.R.: The texts you integrate to your sculptural and installation practice does not have autobiographical or emotional origins. What intention lies behind them?
H.C: I wouldn’t say that my work do not reflect an autobiographical element, but addressing my biographical experiences with immediate emotional reactions through words is not a priority in my text-based works. Some of my phrases, for example, “Up To 200% Off”, “Ask My Daddy”, “Hardcore Conceptual Lover”, “Crucial Babe No.1” are reflections of my interest on the nature of language and the idea of appropriation in popular music — specifically Rock & Roll. I remix the stylistic characteristics of Rock lyrics with a Pop sensibility, which I have a lot of love for. I want my phrases to resemble rock song lyrics. That is why my phrases are short, repeatable and playful. I attempt to reassemble objects to divorce them from the orthodoxy of meaning which has been previously assigned to them. This is how I redefine a new meaning.

E.R.: Your experience at Viafarini has recently ended. How has the opportunity to work alongside other artists by sharing the same work space affected you?
H.C: I’ve been so lucky to make discoveries at Viafarini in this pandemic. I especially enjoyed talking with artists who write and make video

Hyun Cho has chosen to take risks, creating sculptures that are the result of unusual unions and that bring themselves to light. Even though there is no autobiographical reflection in Hyun Cho’s work, it addresses her personal experiences with immediate emotional reactions through language. Whist admiring her works one can find the willingness to understatement the present, for example seen, manga culture and in k-pop, a worldwide custom phenomenon born in your South Korea intertwining it with a more “European/American” skating culture. a true expression of the artist’s cultural mix, having lived for many years in New York before settling in Europe. There she perceived a great energy and freedom in using a skateboard on the streets. Relevant is her intent to articulate these sensations and aspirations, reworking in particular those that are the syneddochi of the skate, perfect and frictionless wheels. In her text based works she remixes the stylistic characteristics of Rock & Roll lyrics with a Pop sensibility, whose impossible advertising appeal reaches the passersby sideways right on the street outside. She attempts to reassemble objects to divorce them from the orthodoxy of meaning which has been previously assigned to them, creating and redefining a new meaning.

Hyun Cho has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions locally and abroad. Gallery exhibitions include: This is not a curated exhibition III, 2022 - 2023, Risky Hardware, 2021, This is not a curated exhibition II, 2021 - 2022 Who is Ramo (Project Room #1), 2021 Does Fluxus still exist?, 2019.