New York Critic's Pick: Hyeree Ro at Canal Projects

Artist Hyeree Ro reinterprets the 'road trip' to reflect on the fractures and misunderstandings of cross-cultural, intergenerational migrations.

Some may consider the 'road trip' a quintessentially American experience, but Brooklyn-based artist Hyeree Ro reinterprets this journey to include the fractures and misunderstandings of cross-cultural, intergenerational migrations. In her installation, Niro (2024), curated by Maya Hayda and presented at Canal Projects in New York, Ro conjures an effigy of the Kia Niro driven by her father, a man from whom she was estranged for 13 years before he passed away in 2022.

Entering the exhibition space, the visitor finds two key elements: a wooden skeleton of the Niro, installed on the cement floor of the gallery's basement space, and footage of Niagara Falls. The fierce force of the waterfalls is accompanied by an ambient soundtrack featuring interviews between the artist and seven individuals who migrated across the Pacific. At first sight, the 'car' looks fragile and somewhat goofy, obviously created by hand by the artist, with durability as a secondary consideration. Inside the claptrap vehicle, viewers can sit and watch the film through the glass-free windshield and listen, via headphones, to a recording of Ro's 14-hour road trip to Niagara Falls this summer.

All that is missing is the roar of the falls—that cacophonous music of the U.S.-Canadian border. Without this soundtrack, the stereotypical hyper-masculinity of Hollywood's vision of a road trip is cut down to size. More Drive My Car (2021) than Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Niro presents a site of community interactivity, in which viewer-strangers gathered on stool-like car seats experience the tension of families on the move.

It helps to know that Ro grew up between Seoul and Santa Rosa, California, and went to college in Korea before returning to the U.S. to gain an MFA from Yale School of Art. These crossings directly inform her work. It is unsurprising to discover that one of her teachers at Yale was Aki Sasamoto, who has an unparalleled gift for making something happen with minimal elements. Ro has absorbed this lesson without merely imitating her mentor, as was demonstrated in her performance accompanying the piece.

In an approximately 40-minute activation of Niro, Ro noisily dismantled the car frame into three elements: front, back, and middle. Along with the screech of metal against the gallery floor, Ro's voice could be heard speaking fragmented phrases in English and Korean, creating a kind of memory poem–one written by a surviving child who turns the experience of displacement and psychological distance into artistry.

Ro is among several artists currently mining the field of misinterpretation, a particularly rewarding inquiry that eschews subtitles and dictionaries in favour of bewilderment. Despite the obvious confusion at foot, Ro welcomes viewers with a spirit of inclusivity, creating a space that we all can relate to from our memories. —[O]