A studio with a tilted floor, a ceramic artifact accidentally uncovered inside a pillar of a building, secret indoor garden discovered during repair work on a wall, and a roll of blue tape left forgotten on the wall of an art gallery-fictional spaces and situations Shan Hur invites the viewers to explore. Although they do not exist or have never occurred, they are highly probable spaces and situations. Hur’s spaces and concepts, too weighty to lightly dismiss yet also not easy to acknowledge, continue to intrigue and fascinate.

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Shan Hur, 〈Tape No. 4 (in the foreground)〉, 2018. bronze, plywood, variable size. Shan Hur pictured with his works. Photoⓒ Park Hongsoon

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Shan Hur was born in 1980 and later on graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Seoul National University and the Department of Fine Art at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art. Hur has had seven solo shows in Korea, the UK, and Germany, and has also exhibited in numerous group shows both in Korea and abroad. Hur is the winner of the 2013 Royal British Society of Sculptors Brusary Award, the 2011 Open West Curators’ Award, and the 2007 Brighton University Art Faculty Prize. Currently, he is an artist-in-residence at the Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art.

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I was first introduced to Shan Hur’s work nine years ago. One of his installations was shown in a 《4482》 exhibition (4482 is a group of young Korean artists based in London who exhibit together. The name “4482” is the combination of the dialing codes of the UK and Korea. The group first exhibited in 2007 and has been exhibiting in the OXO Tower of Bargehouse since 2008. The show I saw was the 2010 exhibition). It was a white pillar that was broken in the middle. I had the opportunity to see his works again several years later, in his solo exhibition at Hanmi Gallery in London, titled 《Situated Senses》 - 〈Inclined Angles〉, the spatial installation he presented in that exhibition, was even more absurd and provocative. I still remember the feeling of uncanniness I experienced in front of this spatial work, in which the second and third floors of the gallery were partially dismantled and altered as if some construction work was going on. The floors of the empty rooms were made to tilt slightly, with rubble and debris lying about - that was all. If you did not know that this was an exhibition, you would think that there was construction work taking place there. Visitors walked around in this “strange” space with a titled floor with a quizzical look on their faces.

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Shan Hur, 〈The Forest beyond the Wall〉, 2015. mixed media, variable size. Hur setting up his installation in the Sehwa Museum of Art.

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Shan Hur, 〈Sculpture in the City 2〉, 2015. Presented in a Public Art Project supported by the City of London. The view of the installation set up in St. Helen’s Bishopsgate Churchyard in London.

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Sculptural Interventions on Architectural Structures

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Hur started to work with pillars in 2008 while he was completing a graduate program at the Slade School of Fine Art. Most of his major works take the form of interventions made on existing structures. The artist partially destroys or alters an existing pillar or hammers on a finished wall to fit an objet into resulting cracks or fractures. Such works destabilize the viewers’ spatial perception and shake up their habitual way of perceiving architectural structures, causing tension and anxiety. This is an aspect that his works share with 〈Anarchitecture〉 works by Gordon Matta-Clark. However, unlike Matta-Clark who cuts unused structures into several pieces or make holes across the surface, Hur partially intervenes on the structures of buildings that are actually in use, creating irregular-shaped cracks or fractures. What he does is in short sculptural intervention into architectural structures. Also, most of Hur’s pillar-based installations use “Trompe-l'œil” effects. He would introduce a “fake pillar” into an ordinary building and modify it in a certain way, causing visual confusion in the viewers. From his first pillar installation, 〈Broken Pillar # 01〉(2008), to 〈Knotted Pillar〉(2013), all the pillars he made look exactly the same as existing ones in the building. In addition to breaking or deforming a pillar, the artist also inserts objets that are completely out of place into it. Objets stuck into the pillar in 〈Ball in the Pillar〉(2011), 〈Forgotten No. 2〉(2010), and 〈Lucky Coins〉(2010), such as a basketball, pottery, and coins, are concrete, physical evidence the artist uses in his otherwise fictional narratives. In these installations, reminiscent of an archaeological excavation site, the objets appear as though they were decisive clues to the history of a place or a past event that occurred. Thus, although a fictional scene created through an act of mise-en-scène, there are real aspects that are “stolen” from the real world.

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Shan Hur, 〈Tilt〉, 2011. wooden floor, 525×412×35cm. Installation at the design office on Maple Street, London.

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Shan Hur, 〈Knotted Pillar〉, 2013. resin, synthetic resin, 295×89×95cm. Installation at the Business Design Centre, London.

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Artificial Mise-en-scène, the “Realism of the Spurious"

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Hur’s aesthetic strategy consists of producing a huge, powerful impact through minimal but decisive interventions. To compare it to speech, what he does is like saying a few words at the most decisive moment to create huge repercussions. His spatial works involve minimal interventions, yet they make the viewers perceive an imminent danger to the overall structure. His pillar works, for example, force us to imagine the disastrous consequences of a cracked or damaged pillar by reminding us of its fundamental structural role; they make us imagine the danger not just in our brain, but also through our body, thus arousing anxiety. No word can better describe his installations than “uncanniness.” The tension and anxiety felt by the viewer turn an ordinary everyday environment into a strange space. This agitated psychological state is provoked by fictive events created by the artist, and these fictions, although whimsical and created out of thin air, powerfully act upon the imagination of the viewer.

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In works like 〈Broken Pillar〉 series, in which a “counterfeit” pillar that has an identical appearance to the existing ones is dangerously fractured or partially destroyed, 〈Inclined Angles〉 featuring an empty room with a sloping floor, and 〈Forgotten No. 2〉wherein a jar is stuck into a hole in a wall as though an excavation scene-fictive events masquerade as real events. However, his “fictions,” created by directly acting upon buildings and spaces, are experienced by the viewers as “real.”

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What is most remarkable in Hur’s installations, which spark our imagination and curiosity, is the realism of what is merely “disguised as real.” It is difficult to convince people that something that exists does not. However, the inverse is still harder, and this is precisely what “simulacra” is about. The artist’s works are informed by the logic of simulacrum. Through destructive interventions onto architectural structures and spaces, Hur confuses and baffles our perception. Such simulacra are highly effective in throwing off our perception as they are not situational, illusory, or indirect, but direct and physical in nature. In this sense, his fictions have a certain authenticity.

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Shan Hur, 〈Tape No. 3〉, 2018. bronze, plywood, variable size.

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I once said that Hur’s works were “sculptures that are unlike sculptures.” If I have to reformulate my idea today, I would say that what he does is a sculptural act that blends into a certain space, unlike sculptures that occupy space. This is because his works do not stand out on its own or assert their own reality. His structural manipulation of a building or intervention onto an environment or space makes us rethink our usual way of perceiving our everyday surroundings. However, in his more recent works, one notes a significant departure from this pattern.

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《Singularities in Daily Life》 (18 November – 2 December 2018) at Gana Art Hannam featured ordinary everyday objets that are cast in bronze alongside his well-known pillar works. Playing on the physics concept of singular point, a point at which an abrupt change occurs in the state of things, the artist experiments with physical properties of objets. His method of experimentation is not a “negative” method consisting of destroying existing structures or intervening onto a space. Instead, objets are scattered across the space and present themselves as such, as standalone works. However, even with these new works, Trompe-l'œil continues to be an essential modus operandi of his art. Meanwhile through “visual violations,” the physical properties of existing objets become their opposites. In this exhibition, bronze objets are “singularly” disguised as crumpled paper cups, pieces of tape, flowers, and nails. This tells me that going forward, visual violations by Shan Hur might take more sculptural appearances.

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※ This content was first published in the February, 2019 release of Wolganmisool Magazine and has been re-published on TheARTRO.kr after a negotiation was reached between Korea Arts Management Service and Wolganmisool Magazine.