Chuna Chugay: Chin to Eye

Allied Productions proudly presents Chin to Eye, a solo exhibition at the 8th Street Studio featuring recent works in painting and graphic narrative by Chuna Chugay, organized by Grace Muller. Chugay’s first collaboration with Allied, as well as their first solo exhibition in New York, comes after their participation in a 4-week residency at the Vermont Studio Center and includes works produced there. Chin to Eye offers a checkpoint for reflection on Chugay’s ongoing projects addressing the history of the Koryo-Saram diaspora and its reverberations in their own life.

“I did not know the name of my diaspora, ‘Koryo-Saram’ until I was an adult. In the early fall of 1937, Stalin’s regime forcibly deported 175,000 Koreans that lived in the Russian far East, including members of my family, to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and dropped them off in barren fields. Under the pretext of national security, Koryo-Saram were prohibited from practicing their language Koryo-Mar, returning to their lands, or talking about the crimes the government committed against them.” Now, almost 90 years later, Chugay has built a creative practice, grounded in academic research and an oral history project, to understand their family history, as vital context for their childhood in Moscow and immigration to the US.

Chin to Eye pairs Chugay’s recent series of expansive portraits with pages from their upcoming graphic novel, That Same Wind, and invites visitors to settle between narratively continuous and fragmented moments. Across projects, Chugay’s lines connect, twirl, pucker, glow, commune and cut each other off. Whatever their action or character, they buzz with the same sure finality of life proceeding.

Chuna Chugay: Chin to Eye will be open to the public on Saturdays 12-6, and by appointment Tuesday-Friday, scheduling via projectroom@alliedproductions.org.