At the threshold of Gi (Ginny) Huo’s solo exhibition spinnerets, a 16mm film flickers: a spider morphs into a cluster of leaves, then returns to its original form. In Huo’s exhibition at HESSE FLATOW, curated by Jess Wilcox, the spider becomes a structuring metaphor for tension—both predator and prey, tethered and airborne, fragile and unyielding—pointing to systems of power and survival that repeat across histories. It weaves webs that trap, but it also releases and drifts. This oscillation between opposing forces becomes a method through which Huo threads together histories, materials, and images without fixing them in place.
The title spinnerets refers to the organ through which a spider produces silk. For Huo, this point of origin is also one of dispersal and departure. In addition to weaving webs, spiders travel vast distances, carried by forces they cannot fully control, through a process known as ballooning, Huo tells me. Suspended midair, the spider hovers between agency and surrender: a small body tied into larger systems, where intimate scale meets expansive forces. Spiders balloon to escape predators, avoid crowding, and repopulate elsewhere. This movement suggests a broader condition of displacement, where bodies are carried into new environments and adapt in ways that make return uncertain or impossible.
Huo connects the drifting spider to the “balloon wars” between North and South Korea, in which leaflets were dropped across the border. References to personal and historical contexts surface through abstraction and indirection, held within the work’s shifting forms rather than a fixed narrative. Visibility and concealment serve as both protection and risk, echoing the spider’s reliance on camouflage: remaining unseen as a means of survival yet also as a condition of vulnerability.
