GYUN HUR

With this exhibition, South Korean-born artist Gyun Hur (SCAD M.F.A., sculpture, 2009) marks a return to Georgia, the U.S. state to which she immigrated as a young teen, presenting a new body of work that reflects on personal and collective memories of the American South refracted through her family history and heritage.

The exhibition title is an interpretation of “I’ve got peace like a river,” an African American spiritual that the artist grew up singing in Korean churches, with the song’s musical notation serving as a compositional structure for the installation. Hand-blown glass vessels filled with local Savannah River water and cast glass fossils adorn the gallery walls, giving sculptural form to the symbolism of rivers as sites for processing grief and for generating life. In commemoration of our ephemeral existence, a stream of layered images runs through the center of the gallery, leading viewers to a bed of hand-shredded silk flowers collected in a baptismal font. Hur also shows a series of intimate drawings and writings that engage with archival photographs from the postwar period in Korea, shifting once-periphery narratives of emotional and physical trauma into focus through poetic intervention. In bringing these works together, the artist reroutes the circulation of images and materials with the river as her guide, contemplating untold stories and offering a new course for healing.

Press Coverage

SCAD TV: Gyun Hur SCAD Museum of Art