Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Cha Yeonså’s 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).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Cha 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.

Originality & Identity

Cha Yeonså’s practice begins from death and loss. Following the sudden passing of her father, the late artist Cha Dongha, she has explored the shock that the body endures through loss, and the possibility of relationships that continue even after death. 3 Households (2021) addresses trauma rooted in one’s closest relationships and poses layered questions regarding death, healing, mourning, and the ethics of those who survive.

This thematic inquiry expands into her performance work as well. Juicy Mosquito (2020) and Mosquitolarvajuice (2022) introduce poetic language as mediation, bringing forth the paradoxical relationship between the female body, death, and liberation, while sensorially unsettling the boundaries between life and death through contact with others.

Since 2023, her ongoing ‘Festival’ series has focused on remembering death by bringing together leftover dak paper from her father, unclaimed corpses featured in forensic books, and traces of insects—calling forth voices that no longer exist and returning them into the present. The solo exhibition 《Feed me stones》 (SAPY, 2024) most directly articulates this approach, establishing a relationship that seeks not to console the dead, but rather to “receive” meaning from them.

Her recent solo exhibition 《Hum Bomb, Hum Bomb, Hum Bomb Hum》 (N/A, 2025) invites the garden as a new terrain, proposing that spaces of death may be transformed into narratives of healing and resurrection. Through this process, she reveals mourning to be an act that continues in a perpetual cycle of time.

Style & Contents

Cha Yeonså fluidly works across drawing, performance, interactive gaming, and installation. The interactive structure of 3 Households references clinical therapeutic techniques (IFS, EMDR), enabling viewers and players to actively navigate layers of memory.

Her performance practice reconfigures memory, forgetting, and documentation through the nature of live performance as a medium that “disappears at the moment it dies.” In Mosquitolarvajuice, individual trauma is brought into collective solidarity, while the metaphor of the “larva” highlights the latent vitality held by unfinished beings.

The paper cut-out–based ‘Festival’ series merges the materiality of dak paper with the act of mourning. Each work in Festival reveals an essential wound through methods of cutting, layering, and weaving—yet continuously engages in acts of “re-connecting.” More recently, the motif of the “rotating snake” visualizes the symbolism of endless repetition and rebirth, expanding also into the theatrical environment of Those Cats! (2025).

Incorporating non-human elements—such as garden sound, insects, and forensic imagery—her work extends toward ecological sensibilities. This signals a shift away from human-centered narratives of death, instead summoning layered stories of various beings.

Topography & Continuity

Cha Yeonså occupies a distinctive position in contemporary Korean art with a practice that enacts relationships persisting beyond death. Her integration of physical trauma, psychological memory, and the ethics of mourning with literary and clinical methodologies demonstrates a flexible attitude that moves seamlessly across media.

While her narrative began from familial loss, it has expanded in recent years to embrace non-human existences, unclaimed bodies, and the garden as part of an extended community—translating mourning and resurrection into social and ecological dimensions. Centered on the ‘Festival’ series, this continuity foregrounds a temporal structure of destruction–rebirth–circulation as a core principle across her work.

Within the global art landscape, her relational aesthetics—combining performance, installation, and narrative—hold strong potential for expansion. Rather than concealing or resolving death, she continues to summon the voices of beings who endlessly arrive and reappear in the public sphere, offering a significant sensibility to international discourse.

Moving forward, she is expected to sustain her artistic trajectory both within and beyond Korea—creating work that embraces “beings who live yet are erased” and rewriting the language of death together with others.