By Diplomacy Journal Lee Kap-soo
Korean artist Hur Yeon-hwa, who works across sculpture and painting, has built her practice around overcoming the physical constraints of space. Having majored in sculpture, she often grappled with the limits of doors, windows, and studios—an experience that led her to pursue the theme of fluidity, eventually developing installation works that dissolve boundaries.
Water has become her central material. For Hur, its appeal lies in its shifting form—whether contained in vast seas or small aquariums—and in its refusal to be fixed or measured. She recalls her university years in a yacht club, where drifting through thick sea fog left her with enduring memories of landscapes defined only by gradations of color. These impressions, she explains, gave her a sense of boundless freedom that continues to shape her art.
One pivotal work, The Day Struck by Lightning (2022), was inspired by a family story in which her mother was struck by lightning during a sudden mountain downpour. The piece examines connections made visible through electrical currents, highlighting the formal affinities between lightning, nerve cells, blood vessels, and plant roots. In this installation, earlier works—including a coral painting and a hand sculpture—reappeared with new roles, underscoring Hur’s interest in cycles of reuse and transformation.
Light also became a recurring element from that project onward, not as a literal flash but as a connective device. Similarly, her distinctive use of stainless steel and glass pedestals with tiered platforms has allowed her to expand and reconfigure works across exhibitions such as CYCLE (2023).
In recent years, Hur has shifted away from fragile, temporary materials toward more durable substances. While once interested in the ephemerality of works that dissolved outside the gallery, she began to see their wastefulness. Today she seeks to create sculptures with lasting forms—still fluid in spirit, but sustainable and open to ongoing transformation.
Recurring motifs in her work include thickets and coral. Early projects like Dalcheoncheon (2017) drew on memories of the river near her grandmother’s home, while coral later emerged not just as a visual structure but as a metaphor for ecological growth, accumulation, and regeneration. In her current works, bodily forms are reconstructed with coral, minerals, and crystals, echoing the way reefs serve as the skeletons and lungs of marine ecosystems.
Her most recent solo exhibition, Bark of Waves (2025, Art Bunker B39, Bucheon), explored layers and surfaces as metaphors for boundary and connection. Using coral reefs as a central motif, the exhibition reflected the intertwining of human and nature, artifice and life, through organic, nonlinear growth.
Ultimately, Hur aspires to be remembered as an artist who embodies the essence of water: spaces without fixed borders, states always ready to collapse or combine. “I would like to be the artist who comes to mind when people think of watery landscapes—rivers, seas, swimming pools, or rain,” she says, “or even simply of summer itself.”
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Profile
Hur Yeon-hwa creates multimedia installation works exploring water, the body, and the dissolution of physical limits. Her solo exhibitions include Bark of Waves (Art Bunker B39, Bucheon, 2025), Blue Lungs (Gallery Meme, Seoul, 2024), Time of Swimming (Gallery Minjeong, Seoul, 2022), and Floating People (Ujeongguk, Seoul, 2021). She has also participated in group exhibitions such as Ecocycle (KORNFELD Galerie, Berlin, 2025), The 23rd SongEun Art Award Exhibition (Seoul, 2023), and Inter-face (Perigee Gallery, Seoul, 2022).
