Has it ever crossed the mind just how many worlds we similaniously exist in? Certainly, at least at an individual level, there is little need to be locked into one.

It is my guess that this world is nothing more than a dominant idea of incoming and outgoing relations, manifestations of certain thoughts yet not of others, and, when agreed upon across a platform, form the reality.

While this zone may be only a public meeting place of manufactured ideas, other personal private thoughts drive their own course to, sometimes, push through the eye of the needle to stitch something new, while othertimes left to run parallel, and go generally unnoticed.

There is a suggestion that more ideas are finding themselves in odd places, that we live in an age where anything is possible in any place at any time. I remain a touch unconvinced.

Chaiok Cho weaves a fictive story via the use of a simple item, that when multiplied creates a larger self, or forms structures of hybrid beings which coexist with huts and burrows, and spheres that dangle in the air.

Each part of her constructed existence has a common thread. They are all made from a fashion artifact--the hair roller.

The hair roller, a 'synthetic' and to be more precise 'plastic' unit has a primary open core from which tiny firm tentacles protrude and have the function of catching the hair. Everyone knows the role of the roller, and better than anyone the hairdresser understands the roller as a tool of trade to sculpt curls-- personal embellishments used to design 'manufactured', or tailored identity, often, but not only, to enhance a female self image.

The 'roller' is something hollow and has a tenacious ability to cling on.

The head of hair, the topmost peripheral part of the body, is often understood as the most flexible area for adornment. And while hair rollers are one way to achieve this they as objects come across as the least fashion savvy items; to be caught wearing them, mid stage in the act of transformation, doesn’t really bring to mind an episode you would want to repeat. Chaiok Cho however takes them away from this scenario, one of embarrassment, and relocates and repeats, until they start taking on parts of some other environment, 'made-up', or not wholly formed, building a chimera of 'figure in landscape'--and this looks to be the focus of the work.

Why the hair roller? Perhaps it is the most secretive artifact of fashion, something that you use but leave behind when you move out into a public sphere.

For me the public spaces here in Megalopolis stress leaving behind the toils of paid repetitive tasks, the stereotype, and false ID’s. This creates a safety valve zone where enormous flexibility and tolerance is given to the ways you are able to wear yourself. Though, whether the public self ever catches up to the private self, and the salaried other, always remains a mystery to me. On the surface, though, it looks to be the embodiment of pure fun, and, at least, saves the whole place from going Pop.

Chaiok Cho considers identity as something that you pull over the body to reinvent it so the outside self shapes a new body, a new reality, together, at least for the time you are enmeshed, a new self.

And if this is meant to form a synergy with the inner self, Chaiok Cho, quite possibly intentionally, does not make it altogether clear.

In her solo show currently at Gallery Q, Tokyo, Chaiok Cho takes the curler, well many of them, and builds armatures not for but of clothing as if the body was wearing.

In some cases the effect is quite disconcerting. I have this image of the rollers jumping up and gluing themselves together through some invisible force of attraction or propulsion. If I were to place my own (and let it be known) male body as target of this force, I can only imagine the experience as painful. From an outside distance though it feels less so, with the color acting as an attractive and repulsive agent, fey reds blues and greens, somehow fashioned way out of current trend, yet sets lightness, otherworldliness, slyly celebrating self-image with items of the salon.

What we do with our outside bodies and inside selves is really up to us--there are no hard and fast rules. To a certain degree this is a very Asian notion, that what coalesces inside only the person knows, and another may never need to find out unless they are willing, and invited, to pass through into that other world. The outside rest is nothing more than for pure show.

Chaiok Cho explores her own complex identity and female issues with a relationship to the outside world, perhaps especially understanding that here is a male dominated one, and offers the viewer a glimpse of what goes on inside of a women, expressions as an artist, a view from the outside, one ever so slightly penetrable.

'Rose's Dress' is now at Gallery Q until February 1st .Gallery Q/Q concept INC. Zip code 104-0061, 201 Mac Bldg.,1-15-7 Ginza Chuo-ku Tokyo JAPAN Tel. +81-3-3535-2524 Fax.+81-3-3535-2523