C. RYU
■ CYCLE 1 fellow
magnificent machines | magnificent rumors | magnetic dreams (2025) is a film magnifying the seduction and pitfalls of remembering and forgetting. It braids multiple voices, including a conversation about alzheimers in my matriarchal lineage; a recording from my past life regression hypnosis with Astrologer Evelyn Zuel; and a speculative historical fiction uncovering scandalous rumors around Empress Myeongseong, the last Empress of Corea and a liberatory figure against the Japanese. magnificent machines | magnificent rumors | magnetic dreams asks what memories—historical or personal—do we choose to remember, misremember, or forget entirely? And when technology becomes the record-keeper, is there any way to escape nation-state nostalgia, machine dreaming, and the colonialist psyche it may replicate?
C. RYU
■ an interview with the artist:
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 hidden and silenced perspectives of the past to inform the personal and political of the present, C. visualizes narratives activating multiple voices in tension with each other to highlight the complicated structures of 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 collaborates with 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 glitch to remind how much the past has hidden multiplicity, the strange, or the ugly to fit nation-state 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.
Her work, in a sense, is “ghost hunting”—seeking the forgotten, erased, or overlooked individuals whose stories were often the most radical. She’s looking for those who were too loud to be categorized within history.
C. Ryu is a co-founder and co-leader of Hwa Records, 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; University of Southern California; LA Art Show; Kelly Strayhorn Theater; and more.
I DON'T WANT TO DREAM MAGNETIC DREAMS ANYMORE
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I DON'T WANT TO DREAM MAGNETIC DREAMS ANYMORE *
Too Hot for History (2025) and magnificent machines | magnificent rumors | magnetic dreams (2025) are a continuation of my practice using heat as both medium and methodology. Thermal imaging becomes a tool to interrogate the politics of visibility, surveillance, and knowledge-gatekeeping. By manipulating the thermal camera’s representational limits, I poetically subvert its instrumental logic—constructing optical illusions through body heat that resist the imperial gaze and unsettle the assumed objectivity of the violent machine.
Too Hot for History is an altar installation composed of a neon sign and two lenticular photographs. This altar celebrates our inner wildness, nonconformity, and the invisible within my communities—my magical beautiful freaks, the empowered strange ones, and the rebel children that exist in the world. The neon reads “98.7”—a slight deviation from the average body temperature of 98.6°F. This temperature is synonymous with a living, healthy body—but who, or what communities are allowed humane treatment? When difference is weaponized, a .1°F distinction can mark the line between life or death, targeted or protected. Ironically, 98.7°F is still body temperature average.
Flanking the neon are two lenticular thermal photographs where I become both the surveiller and the surveilled. The first image shows the Korean character “화” (hwa)—translated to fire, suppressed rage, flower, or vase—written in ice on my nude body. In the second image, blood naturally rushes back to warm those frozen areas, blurring the word. The two lenticulars are a reminder of the intergenerational histories our bodies carry and how sacred our body heat is.