Project Type: Interdisciplinary multimedia installation
Support & Acknowledgment: This project is made possible with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA 2026).
Rachel Jungeun Oh is a Korean American interdisciplinary media artist and educator based in New York. Working across moving image, sound, photography, cyanotype, and installation, her practice explores migration, memory, displacement, identity, and belonging.
Her recent work increasingly engages with community-based and participatory processes, using sustained relationships, conversation, and collaborative making as part of the artistic practice itself. Rather than treating documentary as a way to explain or represent others from a distance, Oh is interested in how images are shaped by proximity, responsibility, and the ethics of what is shown, withheld, remembered, and left unseen.
Her work often focuses on people and experiences that can become socially reduced to a single category, asking how personal history, dignity, and identity continue to exist beyond the conditions through which someone is publicly perceived.
To Leave Without Arrival is a community based art project developed through an ongoing relationship with Korean immigrant women living in a small temporary shelter in Queens, New York. Through weekly art making sessions, documentary video, conversation, and installation, the project explores how dignity, memory, and personal agency persist within conditions of housing instability.
I initially approached the project believing that creative activity might help restore motivation or confidence, and that documenting the difficulties the women faced could bring attention to their circumstances. As our relationships developed, I became increasingly aware of the assumptions embedded in this position. I had begun by seeing them primarily as people in need of change or assistance, rather than recognizing the ways they were already actively sustaining their own lives.
My attention gradually shifted toward ordinary gestures that are easily overlooked: making a bed, folding clothes, preparing food, brushing one’s hair, choosing what to wear, cleaning a shared space, or deciding what to make during an art session. Within a shelter where privacy and personal space are extremely limited, these small acts became significant expressions of choice and self determination. The project began to consider dignity not as something that must be restored by another person, but as something continually maintained through acts of care, memory, and decision making.
The women also frequently spoke about their lives before entering the shelter. Statements such as “I used to live well,” “I was loved,” or “You should have seen how beautiful I was” initially sounded like nostalgia. Over time, I began to understand them as assertions that a person’s present circumstances cannot contain the entirety of who she has been. The category of “homeless” may describe an immediate housing condition, but it can also obscure a much longer history of relationships, work, family, desire, loss, and belonging.
This realization changed the way I approached documentation. Rather than producing images designed to demonstrate hardship, I became increasingly concerned with the ethics of visibility itself. What does it mean to show another person’s vulnerability in the name of helping them? When might choosing not to photograph a face, ask a question, or reveal a story become the more responsible artistic decision? The project treats these acts of withholding not as absences, but as part of its visual and ethical language.
Movement between the shelter and the outside world became another recurring element of the work. People arrive, leave, return, and disappear. This repetition led to an installation based on the image of an airport baggage carousel, where objects appear to have arrived yet continue circulating without reaching a final destination. Rather than using this image to define the women’s lives, the work uses it to question the expectation that every departure must lead toward a recognizable form of arrival.
To Leave Without Arrival remains within this uncertain space. It asks what it means to leave before knowing where one will arrive, and how a sense of self can continue through instability. Rather than attempting to rescue, explain, or speak for the women involved, the project focuses on the everyday acts through which a person continues to care, choose, remember, create, and remain herself.