Curator: Tang Yifei

Artist: Jungwon Jay Hur

Hive Center for Contemporary Art is thrilled to announce the forty-seventh presentation of Hive Becoming “Flee as a bird to your mountain”, South Korean artist Jungwon Jay Hur’s first solo exhibition in Asia. Curated by Tang Yifei, this exhibition features the artist’s latest works, including oil on wood panels and canvas, etching, and ceramics.

Jungwon Jay Hur’s works are often fictionalised and autobiographical, a disposition that stems from the creative approach of reimagining and continuing art history, religions, and folklore with her imagination of individuality. From her perspective, these inherited narratives and threads exist as invisible wedges that appeal to passive, immaterial elements and recontextualise them with visual, tangible garments. Through this narrative process of self-reconstruction and image collages, she attempts to disencumber the very things that weigh us down, to ensemble and reenact stories and images, and to unearth the significance of symbolism continually.

The exhibition title, “Flee as a bird to your mountain”, derives from David’s examination of the soul in a time of crisis in the Bible, continuing the correspondence of the bird as a fictionalised thread in Hur’s London solo exhibition “A Woman from the Bird Egg”. From the artist’s personal fantasies and medieval altarpiece to her own and her family’s illness, Hur presents a remarkable capability of association and coherence, replacing the protagonists with subjects with changeable identities and transforming religious rituals into everyday objects and psychological landscapes. These girl protagonists are constructed as fantastical, uninhibited, and ever-evolving with the characteristics and metaphors of the bird, which the artist adapts into a series of short fables that navigate between the divine and the mundane. Through re-establishing the threads of the subject’s experience and the perception of life events, she investigates the complex layers of roots and significance of “pain” and “death” in East Asian culture. Everything is constantly revived in Hur’s narratives as she extracts symbolic moments from past stories – like the ever-shifting blue and green water in Patinir’s triptych The Penitence of Saint Jerome and the Holy Robe falling from the sky in Wilhelm Kalteysen’s Saint Barbara Altarpiece – to transform the religious sin and punishment into the escape and expectation of the individual’s social persona. Hur paints on the texture of birch and maple panels, sews together collage stories based on the concept of bojagi, a traditional Korean wrapping cloth, and fires ceramics… All of these manifests her emotional attachment to materials and objects where she maps out her personal history and body, and rediscovers and identifies its stories through nostalgia, interpretation, and connection. Here, “Flee as a bird to your mountain” becomes a mantra, unfolding into a book of revelation.