Untitled Document

SHAN HUR

Lives and works in London

For project, ART PROJECT 2011

ARTIST STATEMENT

Through my right eye

I have been experiencing a very strange phenomenon through my right eye since I was 13 years old : For some reason, there have been spots in my visual field. The spots look like small, compact cells, and they always appear at the right-bottom part of my visual field. I often wondered what they were before I discovered the truth about them.

They were sometimes scary because they seemed to form the silhouette of a ghost. On the other hand, they triggered my curiosity. I had come up with some hypotheses as to what these unknown images in my visual field were. When I was a child, I thought that they were part of a map revealing the location of some hidden treasure. I connected the spots in my visual field to the map of some hidden treasure only for a very short time, though. I guess such assumption about the spots might have come from the Hollywood movies I saw as a child. After all, looking back, movies have affected my ideas to a very large extent.

Before I came to London, I chanced upon a scientific explanation for the spots in my visual field. I went to the ophthalmologist one time because I developed dry-eye syndrome. After the medical examination, the doctor asked me if I encountered an accident in the past involving my right eye. He showed me the scar on my cornea on his monitor. He was right. An old memory flashed through my mind at that point. I was hit on my eye by a flying soccer ball. The illusion was a scar then!

This slightly disappointed me because I realized that the spots in my visual field were nothing really special, which I thought they were. The other reason was that discovering the truth about the spots in my visual field meant the end of my imagining. Besides, I do not like the implications of having a scar. I could not think of the spots as being just a scar because their shape was so beautiful and because they had brought many thoughts into my mind.

When I see something, the crack of my right eye is always overlapping. The overlapped image seems my genuine experience. Especially it is clear in empty space. In my practice, I trace the relationship between the crack and the space. Sometimes, I encounter the personal experiences or inner emotions through the overlapping images.

Moreover, it is collaborated with my works that combinations are between the left sides: rational parts and the right sides: emotional parts of human brain. Therefore, I want to express harmonies which have emotional feeling not to recognize to use common parts in everyday life and rational values from my works.

EDUCATION
2010 M.F.A. Slade School of Fine Art 2008-2010, London, UK
2007 B.F.A Sculpture, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

EXHIBITIONS
2010 'The grass will grow over the city', Hackney Wicked Festival, London, UK
2010 'Present from the past', Korean Cultural Centre London, UK
2010 M.F.A degree show, London, UK
2010 '4482', Bargehouse, London, UK
2010 'Artist in residence', HEAL'S, London, UK
2009 'Make it. Print it. Pack it. Ship it ', closed shop(Fedex), London, UK
2009 'CROSS FIELDS', Korean Cultural Centre London, UK
2007 B.F.A Degree Show, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

AWARDS AND RESIDENCY
2009 Group residency based around Kurt Schwitters Merzbarn
2007 Brighton University Art faculty Prize

PUBLICATION
2010 'Making surroundings'

Projects 2011 London Art Fair | Art Projects

Shan Hur’s sculptural interventions disrupt the viewer’s perception of the white cube as an art container, directly implicating the gallery space as an active element in the artwork itself. The ideas which inform his practice derive from a careful examination of construction sites and closed shops, fascinated by the moment of transition when a particular space is reconfigured for a new purpose. During this transition the polished veneer of the city is temporarily removed, thereby exposing its farcical nature, and the mechanisms by which this veneer is generated.

For Acquisition (London Art Fair 2011-Art Projects), Hur exposes and plays with the facade of the exhibition space, transforming it into a site of discovery. Rather than the passive role in which the viewer traditionally receives sculpture within the context of the gallery, here he becomes an active participant, in what seems to be an excavation. Though the participatory aspects of Hur’s work are mental rather than physical, they uncage an inquisitive imagination, evoking memories of the adventures and discoveries made during childhood.

However, this excavation is clearly staged; Crowns are not excavated from walls. A wall would never be excavated during an art fair. And if it was, surely the crown would not look so clean as this one does. Hur draws the viewer into a game of make believe, layers of illusion and artifice becoming a source of irreverence and humour. By interrupting our regulated experiences within the gallery space, he allows the viewer a momentary escape from the mundane, a glimpse into the sublime.

- Marius Grainger