My Way of Being:
Hanna Hur in conversation with Christopher Y. Lew

Independent NY OVR, May 2022

Christopher Y. Lew: Let’s start with how you are making these paintings. The structure of the grid and repetitive mark-making is very prominent.

Hanna Hur: I make the paintings in two parts. There’s the colored and patterned ground, and then the ensuing image that appears over the pattern. Some of them don’t follow this method but for the most part they are made this way. Drawing a grid and patterning the ground of the painting prepares a space for the image to arrive. I came to this process by noticing that images came to me more slowly than I would have liked them to. I felt like I was waiting for the next one to arrive with nothing to do. I started doing this kind of repetitive mark-making to fill the time between their arrivals and keep my hands busy. I think the images that come through for me are really concentrated and the thickness of time that precedes them is what gives them their potency.

Lew: Can you speak about your process of making the works? I imagine it’s quite a time-consuming endeavor.

Hur: Yes, it’s very time consuming! I’ve always liked prolonged, repetitive labor. I realized this most clearly when I started to make chainmaille over ten years ago. Making it involves me shaping, cutting, and attaching each ring together. My paintings have evolved over the years to reflect this repetitive pro- cess more. This way of working gives me a deep relationship with time and there are many thresholds of experience that I move through while making. It might begin as an enjoyment of solitude and a feeling of relaxation and then I meet the threshold of boredom. Then, maybe it’s another threshold of tiredness, exhaustion, then transcendence, inspiration, then emptiness or spaciousness, and on. They don’t always happen in this order and it’s usually a lot of bouncing back and forth between states, but there’s a wide range of experiences, from the mundane to cosmic. I often wonder if the surfaces absorb this accumulation of time and touch. I think of it as an image-sentience that gets produced that has its own capacity for a kind of transference to occur with its viewer.

Lew: Can you speak more about this idea of sentience? If I’m following you, your experience of making the painting is imparted upon the viewer? Or does the painting itself have a kind of consciousness?

Hur: I ask myself these questions too. The mechanism of this image-sentience is mysterious to me.
I highly doubt that my own experience of making the work is being translated to the viewer via the painting itself. I think I might feel disappointed if that were the case since I hope that the works communicate things that aren’t attached to my subjectivity. Maybe through the hours of working on them, the painting develops its own subjectivity or specific presence. Like how an amulet or talisman might be made. When I look at the paintings, they have authority over themselves. I experience an other volition that isn’t mine coming through them. They don’t have vision like we do, but I see deep eye contact when I look at them, they’re definitely staring back at me. Is that a kind of consciousness? I don’t know. But my relationship with them feels more akin to how I relate with things that are alive. It’s possible too that this is a projection on my part. Can you relate with this at all? Maybe you’d describe this phenomenon differently.

Lew: No, I can relate. The works take on lives of their own, especially once they leave the studio. This also reminds me of what PS1 founder Alanna Heiss described when installing an exhibition. She imagined each work as a guest at a dinner party, which pieces are getting along, which are causing friction, which don’t seem to be talking to one another.

Hur: Oh, that’s a fun way to think about it. I feel like my paintings would be really awkward dinner party guests. I imagine they would all be very sober and then one might break out into chants at the table out of nowhere.

Lew: [Laughs] It sounds like they would have a lot to offer! Coming back to the grid—it’s a very stable composition but the optical effects you achieve through the highlight colors are very powerful and trippy. Can you describe what’s happening? Especially since it does not reproduce well in images.

Hur: Yes, they reproduce so differently than how they appear in person. The optical effects have a way of thwarting the stability that the grid gives to the image, and this doesn’t really translate in photo- graphs. When you look at the paintings in person, everything in them is moving and nothing is stable. In a way, the paintings are complete only in the eye of the viewer because vision is what activates the images’ movement.

Lew: When we met in the studio you had mentioned Agnes Martin in reference to the grid, and the expressiveness of her hand painted lines. Can you speak about that? And were there other artists who were inspirations for this body of work?

Hur: I’ve always appreciated that Agnes Martin self-identified as an Abstract Expressionist. I love
her claim because there’s so much emotion that’s expressed in the quality of a line. If you look at my paintings up close, you can see my hand in all the marks that have been made. There’s precision to them but there are also lots of irregularities. This gives the work a sensitivity which I think often comes as a surprise because from a distance or from a photograph, the work can read as hard-edge painting or as really graphic. In reality, they’re a lot softer than that.

The Quad works take their titles from a play/ballet by Samuel Beckett called Quadrat 1+2. They weren’t made in connection with this piece but when I made the first Quad painting, I initially titled it Four Corners. Then I remembered this Beckett play that I loved so much and re-titled it. In his play, you see four cloaked figures enter the scene one by one. They move around and through a square in a repetitive pattern. Each figure has an accompanying percussive element so there’s also this layered composition of music that adds to the sense of urgency in their movements. There’s this feeling of simultaneous hyper- structure and total chaos that I relate to in my work. I find the symmetry of a square to feel really intense. It’s beautiful and balanced but also constricting and somewhat frightening. I experience the grid in this way too. I love its uniformity and structure, and these qualities also provoke me to want to break its stability.

Lew: Beckett’s choreography seems to operate in a mathematical way and so do the permutations of Quad. Can you speak about the series and the scope of the project?

Hur: I don’t think I’m working in series since that seems to imply a finite amount of works that deal with a set of questions or interests. I think of my work as more like an endless fractal of itself. The Quad works are an ongoing project where the composition will always remain the same. I’m interested in what it means to make the same thing over and over again. I’ve made eight of them so far, I’m so curious to see what happens when there are thirty, fifty, or a hundred of them. Right now, I see a face in their com- positions. The four black forms stare at me in an intensely frontal way. I think this could be a celestial or ancient face. Whose face is this though? I’m asking through making them. Maybe I’ll come to know who after I make another eight and then I’ll have a new question or I’ll see something different in them. Or maybe I’ll never get answers and it’ll just be this eternal, epic asking.

Lew: In some of your works you combine looser biomorphic imagery with the hard-edge grid. How do you see these seemingly opposing elements interact?

Hur: The looser biomorphic forms are symbols for beings or entities; seekers, muses, spirits, prophets. When these figures enter a painting, I think of them as asserting their domain or announcing their presence. Maybe imaging them is an act of reverence and this is probably connected to my upbringing. I was raised in a born-again Christian home so a relationship with belief has always been central in my life. I left that faith a long time ago, but I still seek connection with the divine. Maybe all my work is a way of seeking contact. Growing up, my favorite of the Trinity was the Holy Spirit because I loved the feeling of becoming possessed and transformed by something else. I remember receiving my gift of tongues as a young child and it was a single utterance, repeated over and over.

Lew: So, if I’m understanding you, the rigid grid creates a space for the ambiguous, spiritual unknown? Or to venture further, it allows for the connection to divinity you mentioned?

Hur: The grid might be a way for me to make contact, yes. Something about rote repetition opens
a doorway. I see this in a lot of spiritual and religious traditions. Whether through repetitive speech, movement, sound etc., an altered state can be reached. For me, it’s not so mystical as that might sound, it’s really functional. I need to clear my mind to get to an image. When I’m drawing grids or making chainmaille or patterning the grounds of my paintings, it feels like an emptying. It’s a process of necessity that over time, has produced its own aesthetic and image-making logic.

Lew: Hearing you speak about the repetitive process as one that creates a doorway, and that Quad is not a series but an ongoing project makes me think of On Kawara’s date paintings. Art and life are merged together. There’s no division. The artistic practice is literally a living practice. Does that resonate with you?

Hur: Absolutely. I see my art practice as my way of being, it’s all encompassing. I love how his simple gesture in the date paintings became so profound through their continuity. That kind of durational drive is present in me as well.