Rachel Jungeun Oh (오정은)
Born in Seoul, Korea
New media, Audio-Visual, Installation Artist based in New York
As a visual artist and a migrant, I evoke the emotional resonance of leaving—forgotten memories, silenced voices, and abandoned landscapes.
Born in Seoul, Korea
New media, Audio-Visual, Installation Artist based in New York
As a visual artist and a migrant, I evoke the emotional resonance of leaving—forgotten memories, silenced voices, and abandoned landscapes.
Rachel Jungeun Oh is a Korean-born interdisciplinary visual artist and migrant working across experimental animation, spatial audio and emerging media, including 2D/3D animation, AR/VR, and projection mapping. Her immersive audiovisual installations reflect her own experiences of migration, exploring how personal and collective memories of displacement move through time and space via the resonance of sound and image. Her practice interrogates the complex relationships between the individual and society, observing how systemic violence and forced absence shape the emotional landscape of those who are compelled to leave.
She holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College (2022–2025). Her installation work Jajanga was recently exhibited at LaMama Galleria as part of the Every Woman Biennial 2024, and she received the 3D Design Award at the 2022 Student MAC Awards for her animation and media work. Her past exhibitions also include The Red Planet at SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s inaugural Art-Tech Exhibition.
Before transitioning into fine arts, Rachel worked professionally as a graphic designer and photographer in New York for over six years. This foundation in commercial design gave her a strong technical base and an intuitive visual language that now informs her experimental and conceptual art practice.
Her journey into art was neither easy nor linear. Living in Korea under challenging circumstances—including limited access to education and the societal pressures placed on women approaching thirty—Rachel faced systemic and psychological oppression. She recalls feeling as though the patriarchal norms of Korean society, where a woman’s worth is often measured by her father’s or husband’s status and financial standing, had stripped her of sovereignty over her own life. Seeking healing and freedom, she immigrated to the U.S., where she began to rebuild her voice through creativity.
As a migrant artist, Rachel’s work begins with a fundamental question: Why did we have to leave? This inquiry leads her to explore not just physical displacement, but the invisible, psychological ruptures that remain. Her installations do not present literal narratives of departure, but instead evoke its emotional texture—forgotten memories, silenced voices, and landscapes abandoned. Through sonic immersion and the fluidity of moving images, she transforms absence into presence, and migration into resonance.
At the heart of her practice lies a deep fascination with sound as a medium of memory. Sound becomes a vessel—like water—carrying fragments of experience across generations, across borders, and across time. Her installations incorporate lullabies, field recordings, ambient tones, and voice fragments, layered with projection and animation to construct dreamlike spaces. These environments are not fixed or linear, but rather drift between reality and memory—places where resonance takes precedence over representation.
Rachel’s work explores what she calls “transcendental resonance”—a conceptual and aesthetic framework rooted in the language of waveforms, frequencies, and fluid motion. Through the alignment of auditory and visual stimuli, she creates a sensorial harmony that dissolves the boundaries between self and environment. This resonance is not merely a stylistic choice, but a method of generating immersive spaces that transform perception. Viewers are invited to move not only through the physical installation, but also through altered states of time, memory, and emotional presence. Her installations become portals of embodied reflection, where sound and image ripple across consciousness like memory itself.
Her use of projection mapping extends images beyond the screen and onto walls, floors, and bodies, collapsing the divide between digital and physical. In these layered environments, violence is not always explicit but felt—through silence, fragmentation, and the tension between visibility and erasure. The act of leaving is not staged but suggested through atmosphere and sensation. These are not merely stories of migration—they are sites of inquiry, memory, and resistance.
Ultimately, Rachel aims to create spaces that do not offer closure but provoke reflection. Her work invites viewers to feel the weight of absence and the vibration of what remains unspoken. She believes audiovisual installation can serve as a connective thread between past and present, personal and political, body and sound.
As she continues to expand the boundaries of immersive media, Rachel seeks to deepen her engagement with transdisciplinary collaboration, interactive systems, and nonlinear storytelling. Her installations strive not only to be seen and heard—but to be felt.