Gyun Hur is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work delves into themes of grief, memory, and the poetics of diaspora. Born in South Korea, she immigrated to Georgia at the age of 13, an experience that profoundly influences her artistic and pedagogical approaches.
Hur’s practice encompasses installations, performances, drawings, and writings, forming a collection of autobiographical abstraction and figurative storytelling. Her recent work involves creating teardrop-shaped, hand-blown glass vessels filled with water from local rivers and creeks, symbolizing the fluidity of memory and the resilience of communities. This exploration reflects her deep engagement with the poetics of grief and beauty, as well as her commitment to community involvement in the processes of making and remembering.
She has participated in numerous residencies, including Art Farm at Serenbe (2024), Stove Works (2022), the NARS Foundation Artist Residency Program (2019), and the Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship (2018). Her accolades include the Arnhold Forum Fellowship (2024), the AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship (2021), the inaugural Hudgens Prize (2010), and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant (2024) for Our mothers, our water, our peace.
Her work has been featured in publications such as BOMB Magazine, WABE/NPR, Hyperallergic, The Cut, Art in America, and Art Asia Pacific. Hur has presented her work and insights at various platforms, including TEDxCentennialWomen, Living Walls: The City Speaks, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and The New School. She has also contributed as an artist-writer to publications like fLoromancy, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Forgetory.
Currently residing in Brooklyn, Gyun Hur serves as an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design, The New School, where she continues to inspire and mentor emerging artists.
Gyun Hur constructs visual and emotional spaces where diasporic narratives of loss and beauty reside. Her interdisciplinary practice is rooted in grief, memory, and the architectures of care that shape both personal and collective histories. Through iterative articulations of installations, performances, drawings, and writings, she assembles a collection of autobiographical abstraction and figurative storytelling. In the menial labor of accumulating and transforming materials—glass, silk, and local river and creek water—she asks what holds us together: stories, yearnings, rituals, and spirituality.
In recent years, Hur’s work has focused on contextualizing grief within the American South—a grief that remains unformed and unspoken in siloed communities of immigrants and migrants. This intergenerational grief, seeded by the Western violence of displacement and alienation, calls for new ways of witnessing and holding space. Her compositional craft and strategic use of abstraction offer multiple points of entry, creating a landscape where grief can reside—fluid, shifting, uncontained, yet deeply felt.
After a decade devoted to hand-shredding silk flowers, Hur now accumulates teardrop-shaped, hand-blown glass vessels filled with water collected from local rivers and creeks. This material gesture embodies a need to formulate lyricism in grief—to give form to what resists articulation. She is drawn to the river’s constant movement, its choreography of mourning and renewal. In her childhood memories, rivers were sites of washing, mourning, and rejoicing. In a larger context, rivers hold ecological and historical memory—tracing abundance, erasure, borders, and power. The water she gathers carries these layered histories, allowing her to engage with place, ancestry, and the persistence of life amid loss.
Community engagement has become essential to Hur’s evolving approach to making and remembering. What began as an intimate, insular autobiographical practice is now situated within a culturally emergent and historically resonant framework—one that interrogates American history and its violent impact. Through site-responsive installations, sculpture, and writing, she creates spaces that hold collective grief, resilience, and the unseen labor of mourning. At the heart of her practice is a deep devotion to the poetics of grief and beauty—to asking how we might grieve together, and to constructing spaces where loss can be held with tenderness and insistence.
