Cha Yeonså (b. 1997) has explored death and loss, as well as healing and mourning, through a wide range of media, including drawing, installation, text, and performance. Circling around lives that are connected to the body and those that have been severed, she seeks to reconnect and tend to them through artistic practice.
 
In her words, through this process she undertakes “the work of bringing out the most wonderful lies in a neural network where trauma, love, and creativity are interconnected.”

Cha Yeonså’s practice is intimately bound to the sudden death of her father, one of her closest relationships. After experiencing this profound loss in 2021, she began developing works grounded in her reflections on that experience.

For example, 3 Households (2021), produced through the Art Center Nabi Creative Mentoring Program for Young Professionals, is an art-game project that is displayed and playable on PC, the web, and through large-scale projection.
 
The work began with the artist’s reflections on the experiences, roles, paths, and growth of herself, her mother, and her girlfriend—three people with whom she shared her closest relationships while spending most of her time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
In addition, while developing the project, the artist experienced the death of her father. Through 3 Households, she reflects on harm and care, trauma, and attitudes toward death.

3 Households is a work that begins with the relationships among three women and simulates a fictional family unit or a single bodily structure. Within a play system inspired by clinical methodologies for trauma treatment and prevention—namely Internal Family Systems (IFS) and EMDR—the video weaves together quotations concerning lesbian practices, familial sexual violence, quantum energy, and death meditation.
 
As the player sequentially navigates an environment that expands through a fractal-like network and multiple points of view, they engage in bilateral stimulation designed to process anxious memories.

The threefold dimension, originating from a community of three, unfolds like an orderly chaos in which binary divisions lose their validity. Each stage targets themes such as chosen or unchosen family relations, psychological trauma, sudden accidents, and acts of mourning and memorialization. In this hell-like heaven—or heaven-like hell—the player circles through the space according to their own capacities before eventually arriving at the predetermined destination.

Meanwhile, live performance—one of the central pillars of Cha Yeonså’s practice—is closely tied to both the medium’s inherent qualities and the artist’s attitude toward death. She notes that because a live performance “dies on the very day it is born,” she becomes persistently preoccupied, from the moment of its death onward, with how to write new stories about how it might be remembered.

The 2022 live performance Mosquitolarvajuice began with a line from poet Kim Eon Hee: “Any day, any morning, to face it dead, to face it as a dead woman.” Cha Yeonså interpreted this line as suggesting that the woman is not truly liberated in life, but only liberated in death, and that this in itself—a poem emerging from such a condition—is a kind of exceptional circumstance.
 
The artist further explained that she imagined “an image akin to a sublime morning in which one makes an agreement like in BDSM play: to receive blows, to be struck, to willingly give and receive violence or humiliation.” From this, the question “What songs would these women in a comatose state sing, what movements would they make, what bodies would they inhabit?” became the starting point for the work.

Cha Yeonså brought various layers of anesthetized, sedated, or sleeping bodies onto the stage. Each performer was invited as a “larva,” and through pre-performance meetings with the artist, they were assigned their own distinct roles. In this process, the artist first elicited intimate “secrets” such as their traumas or sexual preferences.
 
Through a somewhat aggressive method of revealing her own vulnerable hand and quickly connecting with the others, she created a performance as a catalyst for uncovering secrets and pains that had been buried, forgotten, or unspeakable. Within this performance, each “larva” becomes connected for individual reasons, like a glittering neural network, forming “actions for the exhausted yet living body, mind, and energy.”

Since 2023, Cha Yeonså has begun working with dak paper. It was the material used in her late father Cha Dongha’s final series, ‘Festival’ (2006–2017). After his death, Cha Yeonså brought the remaining piles of her father’s dak paper into her own practice as a way of processing what was left behind.
 
She re-cut and wove the painted papers her father had created, creating works that allow her to attentively engage with “what remains” in her own manner. For example, in her 2024 solo exhibition 《Feed me stones》, Cha Yeonså called upon the painted dak papers left by her father, cutting and drawing on them to make space for unclaimed bodies, insects, and poetic language.

Cha Dongha’s ‘Festival’ series, in which monochromatic planes are arranged in a balanced manner within vertical and horizontal grid structures, reemerges before audiences through the gaze of his daughter, Cha Yeonså. The eponymous flat series ‘Festival’ (2023–), created using a technique of cutting the remaining dak paper with scissors, reflects the artist’s emotions toward her father’s sudden death through a form that can be seen as both “paper cut-out” and “defacing.”

The artist also takes as her primary imagery the dead bodies depicted in forensic textbooks, silverfish dried in damp, dark places, and poetic language, repeatedly shaping and drawing them to form new relationships with these subjects. Among these, the bodies, unclaimed by their families, have been photographed and published in forensic books for the public good.
 
The artist attempts to stand on the same page as these bodies, conducting a Buddhist bath ritual to purify their spirits. The intention is more to create a space where the audience receives something from these bodies rather than to unilaterally comfort them.

Additionally, in the exhibition space, a sound work compiled from recordings taken in her late father’s garden was played once during each session, inviting visitors into the sounds of all non-human beings who had died or been born there.
 
The artist states that this Festival teaches her the impossibility of control when it comes to death, corpses, and childhood. She further explains that, when repeatedly confronting Festival, a paradoxical relationship of care emerges inside that paralyzed time, and to these strange tales or travels to be shared publicly—the Festival simply observes without any interference or encouragement.

After undergoing the ritual of bathing, the recent ‘Festival’ series began to enter a new dimensional realm. Her latest work, presented in the 2025 solo exhibition 《Hum Bomb, Hum Bomb, Hum Bomb Hum》 at N/A, embraces the garden in Namyangju—also her studio—as another imaginative space.
 
Unlike previous works, which drew specific characters, scenes, and gazes into the frame, the garden’s stone pagodas, trees, and Allium flowers now exude their energy outward, beyond the frame. Cha Yeonså cuts out her father Cha Dongha’s older ‘Festival’ works with scissors, offering them to corpses and spirits, and then recreates the Namyangju garden by hand, constructing a new space for these companions’ bodies to move and play.

In the same year, in the two-person exhibition 《sent in spun found》 at DOOSAN Gallery alongside artist Gi (Ginny) Huo, Cha Yeonså re-cut and wove the papers left by her father, transforming them into a vibrant, multicolored serpent whose tail bites its own, symbolizing a continual process of renewal.
 
The illusion created by these never-ending “rotating” circles sublimates the sorrow of dead bodies and non-human beings and becomes the stage for the performances Those Cats! (9 Lives and Resurrected Mother) (2025) with scripts based on poems by Kim Eon Hee and Sylvia Plath.

The structure and motivations of the performances follow the patterns of the cut paper and cite the exuberant, erotic, and debilitating cycles of destruction and rebirth from Cha’s literary references. Thus, it becomes a place where shattered beings are resurrected and confront their fears.
 
Meanwhile, a white mask, stained with iron rust, is Cha’s commemoration for those who arrived in a state of decapitation, and are thus unknown and often unclaimed. Additionally, the tongue sculptures made from used hand planes intertwining with acts of licking, washing, and plaining, are scattered throughout the space extend the gesture of invitation. These sculptures and the mask permit bodies to emerge within the other living figures in the exhibition, whether it is the artist, performer or audience.

Through these artistic acts, Cha Yeonså traverses the various boundaries of our lives, bringing the bodies and beings that inhabit them into the public sphere. In doing so, she creates spaces for their presence, offers them hospitality, and consoles the remnants of existence alongside them.

 ”I want to be a creator who can provide people with vital and extraordinary help in their lives”  (Cha Yeonså, from the interview of Art Center Nabi’s Creative Mentoring Program for Young Professionals 2021) 

Cha Yeonså studied Fine Arts at Korea National University of Arts. Her solo exhibitions include 《Hum Bomb, Hum Bomb, Hum Bomb Hum》 (N/A, Seoul, 2025), 《Feed me stones》 (SAPY Gray Room, Seoul, 2024), 《KKOCH-DA-BAL is still there》 (Sahng-up Gallery, Euljiro, Seoul, 2024), 《This Unbelievable Sleep》 (online, 2023), and 《Every mosquito feels the same》 (TINC, Seoul, 2022).
 
She has also participated in group exhibitions such as 《sent in spun found》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《Tongue of Rain》 (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2024), 《They, Them, and Them》 (Choi & Choi Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《Sad Captions》 (SeMA Bunker, Seoul, 2024), and 《The Motel: Because I want to live there》 (Misungjang Motel, Seoul, 2023). In 2024, she presented the live performance heol, heol, heol at Frieze Seoul.

References

• 차연서, Cha Yeonså (Artist Website)
• 아트센터 나비, 차연서(Cha Yeonså) - 3 Households 집을 지키는 사람들 : 2021 아트센터나비 창의인재동반사업 Creative+
• SEMINAR, { “파괴적인 엄마의 마음”, “생산적인 딸의 양자파동장”, “잠재적인 딸의 여자친구의 물리적인 구조육체” }
• 모스키토라바쥬스 프로젝트 인스타그램 (Mosquitolarvajuice Project Instagram)
• 앙효실, 웃는 여자, 보는 아이, 엮이는 유충들 (Hyosil Yang, Woman Laughing, Child Looking, Larvae Intertwined)
• SAPY, [리플렛] 뼈도 살도 없는 나에게 (SAPY, [Reflect] Feed me stones)
• N/A, [서문] 거상 거상 거상거 (N/A, [Preface] Hum Bomb, Hum Bomb, Hum Bomb Hum)
• 두산아트센터, [서문] sent in spun found (DOOSAN Art Center, [Preface] sent in spun found)