Chuna Chugay: Chin to Eye
Koryo-Saram Landscapes
May 8th — June 5th 2026 at 368 E 8th Street
Chuna Chugay: Chin to Eye, curated by Grace Muller, positions Chugay’s recent paintings face to face with their ongoing graphic novel project That Same Wind. Both projects address the history of the Koryo-Saram diaspora, and its reverberations in their own life.
In the early fall of 1937, Stalin’s regime forcibly deported 175,000 Koreans that lived in the Russian far East, including members of Chugay’s family, to barren fields in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Under the pretext of national security, Koryo-Saram were prohibited from practicing their language Koryo-Mar, returning to their lands, or talking about the crimes the government committed against them.
“I did not know the name of my diaspora, ‘Koryo-Saram’ until I was an adult.”
Now almost 90 years after the Koryo-Saram deportation, Chugay has built a creative practice grounded in academic research and oral history interviews, that investigates repeat patterns of migration in their family history, and provides vital context for their own childhood in Moscow and immigration to the US.
“For Koryo-Saram, homeland is unfixed, and remembered through our faces, upclose, the only landscapes that remain. I flatten the faces, draw them from angles only the closest ones see, and free them of burden to represent.”
Chugay paints in rapid fire, to one song on repeat, from the very opposite end of the brush. Working from their own photographs of loved ones and familiar locations, Chugay’s images operate at the extremes of distance and closeness; A split look up at the branches of a Bed-Stuy sycamore, out across the night-lit Moscow skyline, or over at a lovers face in bed, reminiscent of the dissonant perspectival multiplicity felt by many who migrate. Untitled (естьтакиевершины) and Untitled (посмотривмоиглаза) chart the cheek hillsides and under-lip valleys of Chugay and their partner’s faces, and incorporate messages reserved for the disciples of Russian grade schools. Only those who have years of cursive ingrained can read it flipped and rotated behind wisps of hair.
In Дерево, Chugay’s brother sits with a fresh buzzcut, and the view from their parent’s Moscow apartment stretches out across his eyeline. He has just turned 16, and so has been automatically registered for Russia’s mandatory draft. Russian conscription begins at 18 for all men not enrolled in higher education, however recent studies have found that the draft disproportionately targets ethnic minorities and indigenous groups from Central Asia, the Far East and Siberia.
Chin to Eye also includes six of Chugay’s most recent pages for That Same Wind, produced in a 4-week residency at the Vermont Studio Center this spring. Pages set in 2010’s Moscow follow protagonist Anya through a day at her elementary school, while below, Anya’s great grandmother Insen makes her way home through town in 1937 Russian far East, just weeks before the deportation. Note that, as an autobiographical narrative partially set in Chugay's childhood, That Same Wind uses their dead name and pronouns.
A zine that Muller designed for Chin to Eye takes Chugay’s equation of person and place literally, superimposing a vellum layer of fragmented “landscapes” from That Same Wind over looming facial closeups from paintings in the show. Across the cover pages and three interior spreads, Muller ties expressions to landmarks and paintings to pages. She constructs these associations based on conversations with Chugay and following her own curiosities about the world building between these two projects.
Enlarged and obfuscated scenes of That Same Wind appear in the double-faced “Домой / page 7”. From its outset, That Same Wind has been tasked with clear communication in black and white images and English text. As these pages bleed into paintings for the first time, Chugay permits their contents to relax into abstraction, loosened from their responsibility to inform and orient an American audience. The paintings of pages also freeze narrative time, and open up another function of That Same Wind, as a key or index to read context into their subjects.
For an example, look in from the streetside at Chugay’s side-eyeing present day profile in Домой / page 7 with the graphic novel in hand. The quick-pulled marks behind them belong to page 7, where Anya’s grandmother stands behind her, braiding her hair before school. The diagonal bars that Chugay’s lips and nose graze are the elbows of relatives two generations apart; whose intimate proximity depends on the choice of the older elbow to move from Tashkent and support in raising her grandchildren.
Chugay’s work tunes to the frequency of contradictory simultaneous truths. It foregrounds the terrible and the beautiful that live together in their family history, our shared political present, in large and small injustices. There is no resolution for the dissonance between childhood playfulness and experiences of racism in the classroom, between familial ties and forced separation, between romantic love and ethnic cleansing. Chin to Eye posits no reconciliation of parts, but a space where they may coexist in their fullness. This is one of the first solo exhibitions by a Koryo-Saram artist, about Koryo-Saram experiences, in New York City.
Chuna Chugay (they/them) is a nonbinary Koryo-Saram artist born and raised in Moscow and currently based in New York City. Their work investigates the legacy of the 1937 ethnic cleansing of Koryo-Saram from the Russian Far East to Central Asia, drawing from oral history research, archival materials, and personal memory. Working across painting and graphic storytelling, Chugay explores how histories of forced migration and cultural erasure persist across generations.
Grace Muller (she/her) is a Los Angeles-born, New York-based artist and organizer. She uses drawing, performance, installation, to recontextualize the contents of her everyday life. As an archival assistant at Allied, she participates in the stewardship and future planning of the organization’s archival holdings. Muller also hosts the weekly pop music radio show Lilypad with DJ Leggings. Her partnership with Chugay on this exhibition is born from their friendship and mutual trust.
Chuna Chugay, That Same Wind, panel detail