Hyeree Ro’s “Niro” Takes Us on the Immigrant Journey
Fragments of Korean and English words and phrases fill the lower gallery of Canal Projects as artist Hyeree Ro begins her performance for her newly commissioned installation, Niro: 스바루 (Subaru), Niro, Eat Clean, Never run it cold, 샌프란시스코 (San Francisco)… In a steady, detached tone, Ro recites each phrase with pauses in between, creating an unintentional rhythm. Each utterance emerges as a fragment of memory from a cross-country road trip with the artist’s late father and the aftermath of his passing—echoes of conversations she shared with him, fleeting thoughts, observations, and encounters.
As her narration unfolds, Ro moves around a life-size wooden chassis of a Kia Niro, the same model her father drove on their road trip. Various objects made of steel, ceramic, chain, pewter, and paper mache adorn the car from front to back. The unwieldy installation is soon disassembled into three sections as she drags and pushes each piece across the space. Her struggle to maneuver the towering structure subtly evokes the weight and fragmented nature of her memory and the relationship with her father.
The exposed screws and rigid wooden strips sharply contrast with the car’s mobile yet precarious assemblable form. Described by the artist as a “bundled scrap,” the framework reflects a life pieced together from disparate fragments—moments of intimacy and distance, the bond between father and daughter, and the scattered remnants of immigrant life. Growing up in California, returning to Korea as a teenager, and later returning to the US, Ro embodies the continuous journey of a constant migrant, navigating and bridging the emotional landscapes of belonging, cultural identity, and memory throughout her practice.
Facing the car, a large screen on the innermost wall plays a 65-minute compilation of interviews with Asian Americans, each sharing their experiences of crossing the Pacific Ocean. This layered composition echoes Ro’s 2022 exhibition, “Falls”, where she presented interviews with eight immigrants in the US, weaving personal narratives into the broader socio-political histories of the US and their home country, including events like the IMF crisis and the presidential election of Donald Trump. If “Falls” marks the beginning of Ro’s shift from her own story to a collective narrative, Niro signals an ongoing evolution of her work. Here, she brings together diverse voices and stories of Asian Americans within a shared space, creating an open-ended work that invites viewers to contemplate connections and possibilities beyond any fixed interpretation.
In Niro, space itself emerges as a powerful metaphor for the immigrant experience, embodying both physical and emotional dimensions. Just as Ro’s wheeling home traverses the exhibition space and the Kia Niro that once carried her and her father across the US, migration is often seen as a linear journey from one place to another. However, by intertwining the voices of those straddling the two homes and placing her own story alongside theirs, Ro aptly portrays the fluid, multidimensional nature of such movement.
The space in Niro is layered, complex, and, at times, uncomfortable. It exists in visible gaps between wooden strips, in the pauses between her jumbled words—a rhythm mirroring the speech patterns shaped by multilingual lives—, and in the re-lived present moment and the memories. Rather than a void, these gaps become a site that resists categorization, evolving into what Henri Lefebvre calls “representational space”— a place charged with personal meaning, memories, absences, and the resilience of cultural survival. Ro invites viewers to step into the immigrant experience, asking them to bridge the incomprehensible through observation, gesture, and imagination. In this way, Niro becomes an active space where her memories and the audience’s perceptions converge, reflecting the ongoing negotiation Asian American immigrants face to reconcile parts of past identity with the need to adapt to a new cultural landscape.
As the performance concludes, Ro softly recites, “Did he arrive yesterday?” Holding a leather object in a soft, dusky orange hue as if capturing her father’s remnants, she murmurs, “He arrived safely.” Through this final gesture, Ro completes the cyclical nature of her trip, from departure to arrival that never fully settles, embodying the perpetual state of transition that defines migration.
Hyeree Ro’s “Niro” at Canal Projects is on view through December 7, 2024.
—Taeyi Kim is a curator and writer based in the US and Korea, specializing in modern and contemporary art. She is interested in disseminating the voices of underrecognized artists and exploring the social functions of art institutions. Formerly part of the curatorial team at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she is a recipient of the 2024 AHL-Grace Charity Foundation Research Fellowship and the 2021 Korea Foundation Fellowship.