Broken Flowers: Interview With Gyun Hur

Gyun Hur is best known for her compositions of shredded silk flowers, meticulously arranged to mimic the patterns on her mother’s wedding blanket. In recent years, the Korean-born, Atlanta-based artist has moved away from this distinctive motif—believed in Korea to drive out bad luck— employing a new palate and turning the flowers into colorful mounds that have objects, such as broken pottery, stone and plants, buried within them. The narratives of her installations extend into performance as well. Recently, while on residency at Artadia in Dumbo, New York, Hur staged a one-day event, in which she and her father set up an optical store modeled after the actual store of her childhood and invited audiences to peruse and interact with dozens of vintage glasses frames. Hur sat down with ArtAsiaPacific to discuss memories, process and the importance of family.

Why was the pattern and color of your mother’s wedding blanket so central to your early work?

I was exploring ways to deconstruct silk flowers collected from cemeteries and had this idea to shred them into an ash-like substance. So, I started obsessively cutting the flowers and accumulated mounds of colorful powders. While trying to figure out how to use these, I had been sleeping on my mother’s wedding blanket in my studio for months and realized that its colors matched those of the silk flowers I had been collecting.

Replicating my mother’s wedding blanket was more important than the pattern itself. I did some research and found that the pattern—which is called sekdong in Korean—is also believed to drive out bad luck and to pray for happiness.

After a trip to Korea in 2011, however, it struck me that my essence of being a Korean woman wasn’t going to just go away depending on where I lived or how much my thoughts evolved. I permitted myself to let go of the sekdong—my use of the pattern began to subside. I felt free to explore and observe my own interior landscape. It may reappear again, hopefully in ways that will disrupt my linear understanding of my identity and surroundings.

The theme of the garden is a recurring one in your work. What significance does it have for you?

The genesis of my work is a desire to revisit or recreate the past, using art as a means to connect with the self that I “left behind” in Korea. I decided to focus for a while on one specific place of memory—and that was my grandmother’s garden.

As a young child in my grandmother’s garden, I made “dinners” out of flowers, stones and leaves. It was then that I experienced a sense of play and made art for the first time. When I was around four-years-old though, the garden started to lose its vitality and eventually was completely lost to me. Therefore, my memory of this garden is one of joy but it also harbors a sense of fragility and impermanence.

Your parents actively help you prepare your materials, so they are not only the content of your work but part of its making. Can you talk about this?

My work and family are inseparable at this point. Art-making itself is quite mysterious and I wanted to demystify it by making the process itself repetitive, laborious and simple—which is what my parents have experienced all their immigrant working life: pressing shirts for hours. The end product is different, but at the end of a day, isn’t it all work? I wanted to bring in my parents’ hands to prove this point.

I feel an inexplicable urge to archive my story and my parents are a huge part of my life. This is why—whether it’s installation, painting or performance—my family is part of the content in some form. This may be influenced by Neo-Confucian ideals that are still very relevant for Koreans—the idea of family as a unit. Or it may be from growing up in a country where there is a constant reminder of a North-South divide, where we sing about wanting to unite as one nation, one family. I do not necessarily agree or disagree with these ideas but it is important for me to critically observe structures like family in my art.