Jeannie Rhyu

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

Jeannie Rhyu is an interdisciplinary artist based in Queens, New York, whose practice spans across painting, ceramic sculpture, installation, and printmaking. Rhyu traces ancestral memories and emotional impressions by deconstructing and reimagining her cultural visual traditions, excavating the structural remnants of collective memory. Having found home in different port cities, she is inspired by the global history of maritime culture, mythology and oral tradition, and migratory experience, which inform her exploration of humans’ relationship with the natural world. By researching ancient artifacts from museums, collecting photographs from historic and personal archives, exploring visual motifs from documented traditions, and studying forms and architecture from natural history, Rhyu discovers a symbolic language that connects her to her roots in Korea and Canada. She is especially inspired by natural formations such as rocks, stalagmites, stalactites, corals, bones, and shells that hold the passage of time and fragments of the past. Rhyu builds a world imbued with myth and magic where remnants of man-made structures are reclaimed by nature, while marks of humanity can be discovered ritualistically inscribed on natural forms, telling a story of resilience and interdependence of living beings and human societies. In her painted visions, Rhyu explores the displacement and dislocation of collected images and how they become transformed and translated across generations She...

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