2021
Hand-shredded silk flowers, vinyl print, mirror, hand-blown glass, and river water
Installation and 2 days private performance
Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill  | Bronx, New York

Gyun Hur’s So we can be near is a landscape she has composed from memories of loss and beauty. This installation visualizes histories that are personal, familial, and intimately shared. Under soft yellow light, the Sunroom is lined with etched mirrors along the edges. Within the mirrored space, Hur has gently placed a large vinyl print comprising personal photos on the floor of the Sunroom and covered it with thousands of hand-shredded, yellow silk flowers that obscure parts of the print. By blurring and revealing aspects of these images, the artist imagines an elusive terrain where her psyche dwells in an impossible yearning to be with her beloved.

Hur’s labor-intensive process involves repetition and resilience—embodying the invisible toll that loss has on the body. At certain times over the period of the exhibition, the installation becomes a space that holds Hur as she grapples with inevitability and melancholia. While performing, the artist traces her journey of migration through her internal landscape of emotions and personal recollection. There, her childhood memories of mountains and oceans from South Korea join the greenery of the American South, forming the backdrop of her immigrant families’ stories that have been whispered in dreams and silence. 

Glass sculptures in teardrop shapes are installed on the Sunroom gallery’s wall. These fragile vessels hold water collected from the Hudson River nearby Wave Hill and Delaware River in Narrowsburg, New York. From the Hudson to Georgia’s Chattahoochee River, the artist’s past is remembered and baptized in healing. The presence of this river water provides a spiritual anchor for Hur as she unravels her continual reckoning with irreconcilability, a core of Hur’s practice.

*

“Hur’s exquisite installation consists of a large vinyl print — a palimpsest of 15 family photographs — placed on the floor and surrounded on three sides by engraved, floorboard-height mirrors that extend the viewer’s perception of ground-level space. The mottled gray print appears abstract, with only whispers of discernible referents (ripples in the Delaware river; outlines of Hur’s mother-in-law tending a garden); regions of it have been dusted with finely shredded yellow silk flowers that hum like algae blooms. A series of teardrop-shaped glass bottles, each filled with river water, hangs on the back wall. The entire Light and Space-esque installation has a devotional quality to it — as though in tribute to an unspecified loss — in keeping with the artist’s meditative performances, realized upon similar installations, such as her early 2020 I wouldn’t know any other way, at BRIC.” 

- Bury, Louis, “Ecological Art Infused by Memoir and Identity,” Hyperallergic