“We were dancing, we were wild in the ocean” - Jessie Reyez

Feia presents Sixth Ocean, Eighth Sea, the debut solo exhibition by New York-based Korean-Canadian artist Jeannie Rhyu. As the third exhibition at Feia Gallery, Sixth Ocean, Eighth Sea continues the gallery’s commitment to artists who reshape contemporary narratives through material experimentation and myth-making. The exhibition brings together a new body of paintings and ceramic sculptures that explore migration, memory, and the ocean as both a physical and psychological landscape.

The exhibition imagines a geography beyond the known world, an impossible addition to the established five oceans and storied seven seas that have long shaped our understanding of the planet. Through this speculative realm, Rhyu proposes a space of discovery where histories, identities, and myths continue to unfold. Rather than charting familiar waters, Sixth Ocean, Eighth Sea invites viewers to navigate unfamiliar territory shaped by memory, migration, and the possibilities of becoming.

Drawing from maritime histories, ancestral memory, Korean cultural traditions, and her Canadian roots, Rhyu creates imagined artifacts and mythic narratives that explore what it means to belong to multiple places at once. Across luminous oil paintings and hand-built ceramic sculptures, recurring motifs - including sea creatures, migrating birds, celestial bodies, and ceremonial objects - emerge as symbols of displacement, resilience, and transformation. Together, these works form a mythopoetic world where personal recollection, collective history, and intergenerational knowledge drift through ever-shifting currents.

Rhyu's multidisciplinary practice spans painting, printmaking, ceramics, and installation. Through research into historical archives, museum collections, and family histories, she constructs a symbolic visual language that bridges geography, time, and cultural inheritance. Rather than reconstructing the past, her works imagine new mythologies that honor the fluidity of identity and the enduring connections between people, place, and the natural world.

Sixth Ocean, Eighth Sea invites viewers into an immersive space where memory moves like a current, histories are continually rewritten, and the sea exists as both origin and destination. These waters hold both genesis and wreckage, carrying fragments of forgotten histories, lost journeys, and inherited grief while opening possibilities for renewal and discovery. Here, the familiar yields to the unknown as the boundaries between history and myth, land and water, and home and elsewhere dissolve. Through this poetic body of work, Rhyu offers a meditation on migration, belonging, and the stories we carry, lose, and recover across oceans.