Canal Janchi 잔치
Jeenho Seo + Cassandra Mayela Allen + Hai-Wen Lin
Thursday, February 26, 2026, 6:30pm
Titled Canal Janchi 잔치, this program invites artists who use garments in their practice to present a PechaKucha lecture on how these textiles hold meaning in their work. This Pecha Kucha series takes inspiration from our exhibiting artist Jakkai Siributr’s frequent use of garments to comment on family as well as social and political histories in Thailand. For example, Jakkai gathered uniforms from members of the tourist industry who lost work during COVID in the Outworn series, and brought together his late mothers clothing to reflect on his matrilineal lineage in Broadlands. For this session, we will hear from artists Cassandra Mayela Allen, Jeenho Seo and Hai-Wen Lin.
To start the lecture series, artist Christina Yuna Ko will guide a somatic and writing exercise to open the Janchi 잔치 and cultivate its intimate yet convivial atmosphere. Driven from research into ritual and its role in the diasporic home, Canal Janchi 잔치 conceptualizes the Korean word for town festivals/feasts to make space to share the threads connecting ourselves and our contexts revealed in the daily life material of garments. Alongside the opening exercises, Christina will adorn the space with hanging textiles reimagining Janchi 잔치 from her archives and memories, while also drawing upon the Buddhist framework of ritual adornment janguhm (장엄) to help us carry conversations that center the experience of garments as embodied and beyond the self.
We invite you to join us for this evening of gathering, sharing, and listening.
organized by Christina Yuna Ko & Caroline Taylor Shehan
Cassandra Mayela Allen is a self-taught artist based in New York City since forcibly migrating from Venezuela in 2014. Her work spans mixed media, textiles, installation, and socially engaged art, focusing on memory and belonging. She’s been an artist in residence with Modern Ancient Brown (DT), Pocoapoco (MX), Campo Garzón (UY), Bolster Arts (NYC) and is an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent projects and exhibitions include La UNAM (CDMX), Olympia (NYC), MOCAD (DT), V1 Gallery (CPH). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, Elephant Magazine, American Craft Council and Vogue México.
Jeenho Seo (b. 1989, Korea) is a sculptor whose practice examines how individuals negotiate psychological and social pressure through material and space. Working with everyday objects such as clothing and food alongside casting materials like resin, Seo creates objects and installations that test how meaning, dependency, and control emerge through physical form and spatial arrangement.
Seo received an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art in 2021 and a BFA in East Asian Painting and Sculpture from Hong-Ik University in 2015. His work has been exhibited in New York and Seoul, including at Space ZeroOne, Underdonk, Subtitled NYC, and Below Grand, and has also been realized in non-traditional or provisional settings such as construction sites
(Pangyo 621, Korea), nearby fields, and public parks—where instability, exposure, and context become active elements of the work. His practice has been supported by the Seoul Foundation
for Arts and Culture.
Hai-Wen Lin is an artist from Elk Grove, California, currently working somewhere beneath the Chicago sky. Their work addresses autobiographical narrative as it echoes across history and the natural environment, often moving through metaphor, etymology, sunlight, wind, and the way time passes perfectly when you are out walking on a beautiful day. Lin is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, received a M.Des in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA from the University of California, Davis. They are a recipient of the Museum of Art and Design’s Burke Prize, the Ellis-Beauregard Visual Arts Award, and a Luminarts Visual Arts Fellowship. Lin has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Lighthouse Works, Ox-Bow, the Grand Canyon National Park, among many others. They have taught workshops supported by the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, the Mint Museum, the Heritage Museum of Asian Art, and the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology and have exhibited their work in recent solo exhibitions at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago (2025), the Centre for Cultural and Artistic Practices (2025), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2025). You can often find their work by looking up.
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Jeenho Seo. Courtesy of the artist. -
Cassandra Mayela Allen. Courtesy of the artist. -
Hai-Wen Lin. Photography by Mrlo, Courtesy of McColl Center.