Gi (Ginny) Huo: spinnerets

HESSE FLATOW is pleased to present spinnerets, a solo exhibition of a recent body of work by New York-based artist, Gi (Ginny) Huo. Developed during her 2024-2026 Princeton Arts Fellowship, this suite of sculpture, video, and works on paper debuted at the Hurley Gallery at the Lewis Center for the Arts in 2025.   

Huo’s show, titled after the spider’s organ that produces its threads, takes the spider as a metaphor for the diasporic individual. Spider silk, barely visible fibers capable of sustaining immense stress, resemble the connections of kinship among migrating and displaced subjects. This constellation of works maps the artist’s family history, weaving across the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, (her relatives hail from both sides of the border), to the Hawaiian archipelago, where Huo was born. Embracing the incompleteness of the historic sources and the inherent gaps and misalignments of translation, Huo delineates the ambiguity of inheritance.

Huo links ballooning, the spider’s method of long-distance travel wafting on air with gossamer thread parachutes, to the military propaganda and civilian methods of communication across the Korean no-fly zone. Since the onset of the Korean War, United Nations forces have launched billions of leaflets across the border to North Korea, sometimes reciprocated with counter messages in print, and occasionally via deposits of trash or feces. Hand drawn (and some printed) images of propelling spiders and drifting balloons based on archival photographs capture these survival strategies. Huo’s manipulations of these images, magnified to grainy texture or repeated like frames of a film strip, leave one to ponder the imperfections of translation across languages, media, and generations. This play between the historic document and interpretive gesture expands Huo’s ongoing exploration of her grandfather’s photographic practice during the Korean War and his baptism into the Mormon church. Stitching the hand drawings to archive-based prints with rubber cord, like little webs of care and support, Huo reminds us that the history is bound to subjective experience of heritage. 

Several steel works, in web-like forms of a wall relief and floor sculptures, further develop Huo’s investigation of the line as lineage.  Riffing on the knowledge that spider silk is stronger than steel, Huo renders kinship connections in three dimensions. Huo again embeds archival references. This time enclosed within the hand-wrought alloy web. The balloon depictions recur printed on ribbons of ttransparent film that bow and arc, as their flat surfaces entwine with a steel trap. Framed by circular profiles, these surface line nexuses suggest movement. More specifically, these assemblages’ potential for whirling action echo the show's title.

 

A video shot on 16-mm film produced in collaboration with Saif Al-Sobaihi reinforces the atmosphere of unknowability and underlines creative potential of gaps in translation, interpretation, and miscommunication. The black and white footage alternates between shots of roaming spiders and stop animation of leaves of traditional Hawaiian 'ie & 'ie flower garlands spinning as if in dance. With the mirroring between the plants’ radial forms and that of the spider’s bodies and webs, Huo offers multiple lines of flight for the imagination and points of potential for meaning and connection.    

 

-Jess Wilcox

 

Access Information: Entrance to the exhibition requires descending a staircase and is not ADA accessible. WARNING: The video contains rapid, flashing lights that may not be suitable for people with photosensitivity or photosensitive epilepsy.