JEANNIE RHYU is a Korean Canadian artist, based in Queens, New York, whose interdisciplinary practice spans across painting, printmaking, and ceramics. Rhyu traces ancestral memories and emotional impressions by deconstructing and reimagining her cultural visual traditions, excavating the structural remnants of cultural collective memory. She is especially interested in the displacement and dislocation of collected images and how they become distorted and transformed through translation and across generations. By researching ancient artifacts, ritual and ceremonial objects from museums, historic photographs from digital archives, and visual motifs from documented history, Rhyu discovers a symbolic language that connects her to her roots and inspires her future. Throughout Rhyu’s body of work, images including the fathomless ocean, migrating birds, intrepid seafarers, and the night sky recur with the rhythm of memory and experience. From the deep blue primordial waters of generational wisdom, ancestral stories, and personal recollections, Rhyu’s emotional reality emerges, where she bridges the gaps between different cultural understandings through imagination and mythopoesis.
Jeannie Rhyu received a B.A. from Columbia University in the City of New York, and is a candidate for an M.F.A. at Columbia University School of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally in shows in New York, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Seoul, Beijing, and London. Selected exhibitions include shows at Harper’s Gallery (New York), Spring/Break Art Show (New York), The Border Gallery (New York), Seefood Room (Hong Kong), Shin Gallery (New York), Field Projects and Tutu Gallery (New York), and Leroy Neiman Gallery (New York). She has given artist talks and workshops at Columbia University, 92nd Street Y, and other community organizations. When she isn’t making art, she works as a print coordinator at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies.