Gi Huo and Cha Yeonså Confront Familial Legacies

What can we make of the legacies we did not choose, yet continue to live with? This question underlies ‘sent in spun found’, a two-person exhibition featuring New York-based Gi (Ginny) Huo and Seoul-based Cha Yeonså at DOOSAN Gallery in Seoul. Through installation, drawing and video, the artists work through what has been handed down – Huo, from a family history of migration and religious faith, and Cha from the material remnants of a deceased father – to consider how the inheritances that befall us might generate forms of care, resistance and renewal.

Huo’s and Cha’s practices are not obviously aligned: the former distils her journeys with quiet precision, while the latter lets emotion spill into more tactile forms. The works share the space without clear division, forming an unlikely but dynamic rhythm: Cha’s colourful, lightweight mat of papercut weaving (Festival 25 #1–9 Circus, 2025) sits parallel to Huo’s rubber conveyor (2025), hanging heavily from the ceiling; Huo’s glossy photograph of insulation material rests behind a sleek metal grid (insula, 2025) as Cha’s eerie faces rise from crumpled paper (Festival 25 #14–15 Die Kranichmaske, 2025) to confront it from a distance.

Cha’s ‘Festival’ series (2023–ongoing) reworks the pile of coloured dak (mulberry) paper left in the studio of their late father, the Korean painter Cha Dongha, whose sudden death cut short his own ‘Festival’ series (2006–17). Where the father’s paintings were meticulously planned in process and meditative in outcome, the descendant’s versions are instinctively cut into disquieting silhouettes, including images of unclaimed bodies from forensic records. Cha hijacks their father’s title to mourn and to rebel simultaneously, replacing precision with incision. The series transforms grief into an act of radical care, channelling the dead, the wounded and the unruly as a means of staying defiantly alive.

Meanwhile, Huo’s window installation on the way to Lāʻie (2025) turns a roadside glimpse from her first visit to her birthplace in 20 years into a spatial illusion that dwells in the transitory. A panoramic image printed on self-adhesive film curves along the wall, accompanied by a looping 16mm film whose noise and blur render the landscape almost generic, as if any mountainscape could stand in for memory. Home, here, is a site of imagined origin that, in failing to fulfil its promise, sets a generative desire in motion.

Inside, moving insula (2025), an archival print on mulberry paper mounted on a wheeled table, invites viewers to lean in to view hand-sized drawings of Hawaii’s Lāʻie sugar plantation. Huo links the word insula – the Latin root for ‘island’, shared by ‘isolation’ and ‘insulin’ – to the entangled histories of her family’s migration and the Mormon Church’s colonial project in Hawai‘i. Yet this etymological chain falters with another homecoming, to Seoul as an artist, as its linguistic connections dissolve in translation.

At dusk, the gallery shifts: cool white lights dim, a curtain bisects the space and Cha’s lamp-cum-installation Rotating the caterwauling (2025) bathes the room in yellow. The light turns the gallery into an intimate threshold where figures blur, reveries reign and distinctions among bodies and objects fade. On the curtain, Cha projects Reading Aglaja Veteranyi (2022), in which critic Hyosil Yang recalls feeling almost embodied as the late Romanian-born Swiss writer herself. As this reading – part possession, part transmission – unfolds, Huo’s film spinnerets (2025) plays on a loop, its poignant image of spinning and sewing made newly vivid by the dark, alluding to bodies weaving a web of connection across voids. The dialogue between the artists transforms the idea of return into a collective gesture rather than a solitary one. What emerges is not closure but an open circuit of transmission.

‘sent in spun found’ is on view at DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul until 13 December

^{Main image: ‘sent in spun found’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul; photograph: Euirock Lee}