C. Ryu is an interdisciplinary new media artist using translation as a tool to map forgotten histories – to reveal psychological shadows haunting | hunting the Korean diaspora – and performs contemporary translations of rituals for the living. Tracing the edges of the hidden and silenced perspectives of the past to inform the personal and political of the present, C. visualizes narratives utilizing multiple voices in tension with each other to highlight the complicated structures of empire and power while unraveling imperial illusions through geopolitical poetry.

Often conflating documentary and science fiction to showcase the warped nature of emotional time in migration storytelling, Ryu investigates complex historical narratives, questioning who is allowed to be recorded in archives. Her practice is rooted in performance, lens-based installations, experimental capture, and social practice, utilizing translation as a political tool to realize how much the past has hidden multiplicity, the strange, or the ugly to fit imperialistic desires. By re-translating oral histories and re-framing ancient mythologies and demonologies, Ryu alchemizes the shame that haunts immigrant communities to realize how phantoms are human-made. Humans made machines, humans made history, humans have made ghosts, and if terror is manufactured, it can also be transmuted.
C. Ryu is a co-founder and co-leader of Hwa Records (currently in ICA LA's Inaugural 2025-2026 Artist in Residency Program) and JADED (named 2022 People of the Year by the Pittsburgh City Paper). Ryu has performed, exhibited, and culturally produced at Carnegie Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; LAPhil Insight; McDonough Museum of Art; LA Art Show; Kelly Strayhorn Theater; and more.

Photo Credit: Audrey Medrano