Annette Hur: Willful Unknowing: and a KOREAN FOLK SONG

January 30 - February 13, 2021
  • Music is a Korean folk song, 'Arirang' played by Lee Sang Gang

  • It is not an image that I am seeking. It is not an idea. It is an emotion you want to recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving, and of destroying.  

    - Louise Bourgeois

     

  • I see the space in paintings as an all-consuming visual battlefield. Like a sober yet disquieting drama being played out from the protagonist’s placement in the world. Embracing the vitality of the sensations, hyper color-filled large scale images flex between abstract and recognizable forms, such as a falling rabbit, flowers, butterflies or an ominous dark cloud.

     

    -Annette Hur

  • The palette intuitively tunes into the intensity of the emotions involved and the urgent needs of a manageable reality. Oftentimes,...
    Detail of Mother, 2020
    Oil on canvas
    82 x 78 inches

    The palette intuitively tunes into the intensity of the emotions involved and the urgent needs of a manageable reality. Oftentimes, colors retreat to my unconsciousness and mimic the brutal dance of life and death -deceptive forms and colorations- in nature. It is a series of visceral decisions; concealment or disruption of the slivered forms with a purpose of reconfiguration of the broken being.

     

    -Annette Hur

     

  • It’s as if every part were aware of all the others—it participates that much; that much adjustment and rejection is happening in it; [...] just as the whole picture finally keeps reality in equilibrium. [...] a colour will come into its own in response to another, or assert itself, or recollect itself. [...]intensifications and dilutions take place in the core of every colour, helping it to survive contact with others. 

     

      - Letters on Cezanne, Rainer Maria Rilke

  • Dream Writings

    June 9, 2019 

    My child gets away from me, she jumps in the car and starts driving. I should feel fearful, I should feel so scared of her getting into an accident, she may die, she may kill people. I don’t know what she is trying to do by driving, where she’s going, or what she wants. I do not feel fear. I wait.

    She hits three men on the street. She made the turn towards them. I run towards the car, not to the men she hit, I hold my child in my arms knowing that she is fine.

    I feel fine. 

  • Feb 3, 2019

    I see an art in a dark room. I actually don’t know if it’s an art. I was dragged into the room somehow, don’t remember by who or why. I’m just going to call the thing ‘art’. The art is trying to show me something, but I can’t tell what it is. The art is a box, big enough to fit a dozen of bodies in. It looks so old, almost some kind of a relic. The top opens. I feel fear to look in. The shadows of figures in the room are watching me, waiting for me to look into the box. ‘I’m not going to look.’ Not because I am afraid of dead bodies or ghosts or..anything really. I just know there is something that I do not want to see in the box and maybe my heart will stop beating. Fear engulfs me and I look above instead. The wall where abstracted mountains-or just the profusion of green nature-are painted. This room is too dark! But the painting is also sunless. It is coarsely painted. My eyes are fixed on the painting but they imagine something else in an attempt to not think about the inside of the box. I never looked.

  • Oct 24, 2020

    My mother is drowning. A giant wave engulfed her and her arms swing like wings in the ocean. She is drowning and she is going to die. Are you going to save her, father? Why are you watching or what are you watching? Please save her. I scream endlessly. She continues to drown. I did not jump into the water.

     

  • Jan 26, 2021

    There is a hole in my body and I can feel it. I seek for love that I can give, I seek for love that I can get. It is a struggle because there is a hole in my body that only I know, and It stops me from laughing, it stops me from being full, it stops me from loving anything. Maybe I can die. All of a sudden, all I can think of is death; and I bump into you. YOU. I realize that all this time I thought I would stop thinking of death if I ever meet ‘YOU’ again. I was wrong. I want to die immediately. You seem to know what is in my mind. You know what I am thinking and I can not stand it. I want to cry but I can’t even cry. I run away from your reach-your unsympathetic effort- thinking that I am ready.

     

  • The way our mind makes these stories are still little-known to me and, sometimes, they are incomprehensible as much as unfathomable. Grief, long-term guilt, regrets, childhood traumas, patriarchal culture have been marked down for blames. I am beholden, nevertheless, that my body is still working, that I don’t have a child who killed men, and that my mother is still alive.

     

    -Annette Hur

  • Works

    • Annette Hur, Mother, 2020
      Annette Hur, Mother, 2020
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    • Annette Hur, Willful Unknowing, 2020
      Annette Hur, Willful Unknowing, 2020
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    • Annette Hur, Black cloud, 2020
      Annette Hur, Black cloud, 2020
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    • Annette Hur, Breath, cut or burnt, 2020
      Annette Hur, Breath, cut or burnt, 2020
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    • Annette Hur, Fall, 2020
      Annette Hur, Fall, 2020
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    • Annette Hur, Without looking, 2020
      Annette Hur, Without looking, 2020
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