Ruth Cho is an emerging artist based on the Gold-coast, Queensland. Her practice explores themes of heritage, identity and belonging from her Australian-raised, Chinese-Korean viewpoint. Cho often looks to East-Asian imagery to create hybridised images that address the complex dualities of Australian cultural identity.

In 'Crossing over' the artist shifts to a questioning of Eurocentric representations in Australian imagery that present a white national Australian identity. She references Chinese woodcut prints of the 1930s to create a visual narrative that draws on Chinese motif including an Asian tiger, and seamlessly intertwines this with her representation of the native Australian Tasmanian tiger. Animals are a key feature of Cho’s highly pictorial visual aesthetic, both challenging and representing Western cultural domination, in this instance “exploring the potential to de-Westernies iconic images of Australian identity,” Cho 2022.

Of this work the artist writes, "crossing over features linocuts depicting the Tasmanian tiger and the Asiatic tiger. Using stylistic contrast, Ruth Cho explores her feelings of displacement and her multicultural identity, which creates “a space between my Australian and Chinese/Korean roots.” She draws parallels between the displacement of the Asiatic tiger and that experienced by “non-white European Australians due to their physical differences.” Yet, the lively form of the book, which oscillates between two and three dimensions, engages nostalgia (for childhood books) in its ‘pop-up’ presentation. The personalities of these two animals extend this book “to manipulate the space it inhabits and take on a new life of its own.” It creates new ground where freedoms, formal and conceptual, may be accommodated and even embraced.”
Artspace Mackay 2022