In Other Words: Rachel Hsu & Eunhoo Jo
Grizzly Grizzly
September 4 — November 1, 2026
First Friday Reception: October 2, 6:00-9:00PM
What happens to what we cannot quite say? In Other Words brings together Rachel Hsu and Eunhoo Jo, two artists who work in the voids and slippages of language, where words fail those living at the edges of belonging, and where the body testifies to what speech cannot hold. Across video, sculpture, and drawing, the exhibition treats mistranslation, silence, and the unsayable not as failures to be corrected but as conditions to be felt.
In How Beautiful You Are (2021, remastered 2026), Rachel Hsu turns to a private interview she conducted with her mother about immigrating to the United States. Editing her own voice out of the recording, Hsu leaves only her mother’s, reframing the conversation as oral history – the kind passed from one generation to the next and carried in the body long before it is written down. The video withholds any image; white text drifts against black, and meaning is staked entirely on language and its gaps. Hsu’s mother moves seamlessly between English and Mandarin as she speaks, slipping from one into the other mid-thought. Neither tongue carries the whole of what she means; the sense lives in the switching itself, in the seams where the two languages meet. The work lets that movement become its own form of truth-telling: faithful less to the dictionary than to what was felt across distance and displacement.
Hsu’s SWEET NOTHING (FEAST YOUR EYES) (2023) turns the strain of understanding into something felt in the body. Cast in white sugar and mounted against the gallery’s white wall, the work reimagines an eye chart whose repeating text nearly dissolves into its surface. In the effort of reading the text, the idiom “feast your eyes” begins to curdle; a phrase of pleasure tipping toward something more predatory. The piece questions the easy assumption that visibility is a good in itself, and the pressure on marginalized people to mold themselves into something consumable: legible, palatable, easy to comprehend.
In their first exhibition in the United States, Seoul-based artist Eunhoo Jo draws what language cannot hold. Ghost Stenographer (유령 속기사, 2026), an ink drawing on washed cotton, works in a mode Jo calls forensic drawing: the work is made to function as evidence, standing in for the testimony that certain harms never leave behind. Jo is drawn to cases the world declines to recognize, where there is no admissible proof or usable statement. They link this silence to complex post-traumatic stress and the depersonalization it brings on, a numbed, dissociative condition often described as the “reptilian brain.” Where speech fails, the drawing testifies: a record made in mark and gesture, bearing witness on terms the courtroom and the case file were never built to accept.
Jo composes these works from photographs of Seoul’s deserted lots and outlying edges, arranging them by instinct rather than design. Into them they fold grief that belongs to more than one person, drawing on the communal wounds carried by the city’s queer community, including the loss felt after the 2022 Itaewon tragedy. The question of what stays visible reaches all the way into the artist’s own body: a recent diagnosis affecting their sight lets them think through the literal “blind spot” — what sits just outside the field of vision, present but unregistered, inherited yet unseen.
Together, these works treat testimony as something that exceeds the record. What is brushed aside, mistranslated, or ruled inadmissible does not disappear. Rather, it migrates – into a voice stripped of its interviewer, the ache of straining to read, the pressure of a pen. Both artists ask what it means to bear witness when the available languages were never built to hold the truth in the first place.
_______________________________________________________________________
This project is supported by the K-Art Young Creators Support Program, funded by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Arts Council Korea (ARKO), and the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (SFAC).
Rachel Hsu (b. 1992, Seattle, WA) is an interdisciplinary artist working across visual art, language, and poetry. She received an MFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture (2021) and a BFA in sculpture from Western Washington University (2015). She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
Eunhoo Jo (b. 1991, Gwangju, South Korea) is based in Seoul and works under the name zozo. She/they explore and sensitize the linguistic voids that arise from marginalization and abnormality, working across video, text, painting, and installation to engage themes of violence, death, madness, ominous signs, and the lives and bodies of queer individuals tabooed by society.
IMAGE CREDIT: Rachel Hsu, “SWEET NOTHINGS (FEAST YOUR EYES)” Sugar, 81 x 30 x ¾ inches, image courtesy of the artist
________________________________________________________________________
Grizzly Grizzly is an artist collective in Philadelphia, PA. We are all practicing artists who also curate exhibitions, performances, and alternative programming. Using the creative problem-solving skills needed in our daily studio practices, we create a meeting-ground for dialogue and a space for innovative work without the constraints of institutional agendas or commercial interests.
We are a collective of sharp edges, committed to frank discussion and unexpected pairings. We do not strive for consensus; we do not show our own work in the space. We are artists curating other artists, supporting a community of makers from within. GrizzlyGrizzly’s ongoing mission is to blur organizational lines, promote community, and–above all–take risks. In our intimate exhibition space, we build new connections between artists, curators, and our greater community, here in Philadelphia and beyond.
Grizzly Grizzly began in 2009 and is currently under the stewardship of artists Erin Boyle, Jo Cordasco, Amy Hicks, Diedra Krieger, Giulia Livi, Paige L. Morris, Guava Rhee, Maddie Jones Rodriguez, Jayne Struble, and Ari Zuaro.
319 N 11th St, Second Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19107
Email: 2xgrizzly@gmail.com
________________________________________________________________________
