In Transparent Charm Helen Cho creates a fantasy world that carries the weight of a history that has never unfolded or has yet to happen. Half-built sugar cube towers appear to be ruins marred by the weight of time. Piled soap buildings look like they haven’t been touched in a thousand years, and the landscape lies abandoned, seemingly windswept into drifts that accumulate at the base of buildings and rest in the corners of a walled city. Outside of the city’s border, piles of sugar and a muted palette of carved translucent soap bars form patterns, creating a different, but related, world of ruins.

Transparent Charm is more than an aesthetic scenario of candy-coloured towers and sugar-white landscapes; it is an idealized vision of an impossible world with an unwritten history. Cho’s process of aesthetization frames, and therefore determines, the appearance of a culture, but in this world she allows one to drift into fantasy.

Cho does not attempt to recreate history, but instead constructs a space that never existed. She simply sets the stage for fantasy to begin. By using the tropes of an archaeological site, ready with half-standing structures, toppled walls, and the residue of activity, Cho presents a controlled and harmonious stage that is ripe for investigation. She begins a process of pseudo-archaeology that begs to be embellished by fantastic histories.