Jeong Hur / 허정
b. Seoul, South Korea, based in Brooklyn
Jeong Hur (b. Seoul, South Korea) is an artist based in Brooklyn working with pine, hanji, pigment, and light. His work has been exhibited across the United States, Europe, and Asia. He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York.
I grew up in Korea surrounded by hanji without ever thinking of it as material to be chosen. It was the lantern left burning in a hallway at night, the light behind a sliding screen door in an old house, a texture I recognized in temple windows before I had language for why it held my attention. When I moved to New York in 2017 and eventually began building with it, I wasn't reaching for a symbol of where I came from. I was returning to something I had never examined, a familiarity that had simply stayed with me across a language, a city, and a decade. The work became an attempt to understand why.
Photography had already taught me that light is never simply given, that the moment of fixing is always a choice about what gets held and what does not. Building let me stay with that choice instead of making it. Hanji neither transmits light fully nor blocks it. It holds light in between. Facing a light source, it exists only as surface. Turned away from one, it lets the silhouette of whatever sits behind it pass through, faintly. The same panel shifts between concealing and revealing depending on which way the light falls. I did not invent this condition. I only chose to keep building around it, the way I once stood in front of it as a child without knowing I was studying it.
I build without a blueprint, adjusting unfinished frames near each other, far apart, above, beside, until a structure finds its position. Pine, the wood of temporary framing, of structures not meant to be seen once the real building stands, carries that provisional status intact. Because it does not insist on its own permanence, the hanji it holds becomes the part that speaks.
There are two kinds of fixation in this work: one that does not move again, a joint or a nail, and one that can be undone by hand at any time, an angle, a rod resting across a gap, a panel hinged open or shut. This second kind is decided by the conditions present at the moment of installation: the light that day, the floor beneath it, whoever's hand adjusts it. It is a form resolved differently each time, then left waiting for the next adjustment.
I do not decide alone what gets discovered and what gets passed over. A viewer's height, their eyesight, where they choose to stand or step back function as the same kind of choosing I perform when I decide where to cut an opening. I adjust the form, but I do not know what it will become to someone else, and I will not find everything hidden inside my own work. There is no reason I should have to.
What matters to me is not the completed moment but the state of continually deferring it, a familiarity carried from one place to another, still being worked out by hand.
CV
Email: jeonghur0314@gmail.com
Instagram:@jeong.h.something
b. Seoul, South Korea, based in Brooklyn
Jeong Hur (b. Seoul, South Korea) is an artist based in Brooklyn working with pine, hanji, pigment, and light. His work has been exhibited across the United States, Europe, and Asia. He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York.
I grew up in Korea surrounded by hanji without ever thinking of it as material to be chosen. It was the lantern left burning in a hallway at night, the light behind a sliding screen door in an old house, a texture I recognized in temple windows before I had language for why it held my attention. When I moved to New York in 2017 and eventually began building with it, I wasn't reaching for a symbol of where I came from. I was returning to something I had never examined, a familiarity that had simply stayed with me across a language, a city, and a decade. The work became an attempt to understand why.
Photography had already taught me that light is never simply given, that the moment of fixing is always a choice about what gets held and what does not. Building let me stay with that choice instead of making it. Hanji neither transmits light fully nor blocks it. It holds light in between. Facing a light source, it exists only as surface. Turned away from one, it lets the silhouette of whatever sits behind it pass through, faintly. The same panel shifts between concealing and revealing depending on which way the light falls. I did not invent this condition. I only chose to keep building around it, the way I once stood in front of it as a child without knowing I was studying it.
I build without a blueprint, adjusting unfinished frames near each other, far apart, above, beside, until a structure finds its position. Pine, the wood of temporary framing, of structures not meant to be seen once the real building stands, carries that provisional status intact. Because it does not insist on its own permanence, the hanji it holds becomes the part that speaks.
There are two kinds of fixation in this work: one that does not move again, a joint or a nail, and one that can be undone by hand at any time, an angle, a rod resting across a gap, a panel hinged open or shut. This second kind is decided by the conditions present at the moment of installation: the light that day, the floor beneath it, whoever's hand adjusts it. It is a form resolved differently each time, then left waiting for the next adjustment.
I do not decide alone what gets discovered and what gets passed over. A viewer's height, their eyesight, where they choose to stand or step back function as the same kind of choosing I perform when I decide where to cut an opening. I adjust the form, but I do not know what it will become to someone else, and I will not find everything hidden inside my own work. There is no reason I should have to.
What matters to me is not the completed moment but the state of continually deferring it, a familiarity carried from one place to another, still being worked out by hand.
CV
Email: jeonghur0314@gmail.com
Instagram:@jeong.h.something