C. Ryu
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.
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 for 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.
haven luya
haven luya (they/them) creates across ritual poetic performance, tattoo and pyrographic invocation, and altarwork to re-member (tr)ancestral resilience technologies and re-imagine embodied belonging. Utilizing their experience with mixedness, herbalism, and animism, they have been moved to coalesce interactive altars and performance work that interrogates how we might disrupt and re-myth patterns of domination perpetuated in our intimate and intergenerational relationships.
They recently performed their “Trans Plant Poetics” piece for the La Jolla Playhouse Queer Variety Show, and have literary and digital artwork published in Combos Press “Queer Earth Food 3 and Querencia Press “Not Ghosts But Spirits Vol II.” Born and residing most of their life on the unceded lands of the Kumeyaay people (so-called San Diego), they have lifted their roots to weave skin in(k)vocations across place.
Long Nguyễn
Long Nguyễn is a multimedia artist living and working in San Diego, California. He came to the U.S. in 2005 when his mother married an American stepfather. He works with makeup, sculpture, and photography to explore transformation, identity, and the fluidity of human existence. Long’s work often weaves together memories, both real and imagined. He is particularly fascinated by how people cling to memories that never actually happened, illusions and beautiful stories we create around love and belonging.
Throughout all of Long’s work, Vietnamese heritage and queer identity remain at the heart of his art. He draws inspiration from the resilience of his parents’ generation, the quiet strength of the queer community, and the belief that even the most fragile memories can become gateways to new horizons. His art is an homage to the complexity and constant evolution of being human/