White Constellation

Exhibition History

The White Box Gallery, NYC

The Owen Gallery, Bethel, Maine

The Corey Daniels Gallery, Maine

The Lunder Gallery, Maine

E-moderne Gallerie, Philadelphia

Publication

Art New England

Jung Hur grew up in Seoul South Korea, He studied traditional Korean Brush technique and earned his MFA in painting from Hongik University. Jung in several one-person exhibitions in Seoul, South Korea, before emigrating to the United States in 1998. He created a highly acclaimed Michelin Star restaurant Kirara in the West Village, NYC. But Jung never give up his work as an artist, when time allowed, Jung made discrete experiments integrating his art within his food preparations. 

In 2008 he moved to Portland Maine to establish a studio and work full time to bring his art vision to reality. A vision had been fermenting for 20 years, on how to create an integrated art of food and combine into painting. The project finally made public for the first time in Portland in December of 2013. Since then Jung had been exhibited at the White Box Gallery in NYC, the Art Gallery at the University of Maine at Farmington, the Owen Gallery at Gould Academy in Bethel, and the Corey Daniels Gallery in Wells, Maine. Hur’s paintings were featured in the Lunder Gallery at the Maine College of Art’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.

For the first time in 2017, Jung exhibiting his work in Philadelphia at The E-Moderne Gallerie. Followed by exhibitions in Boston, Seattle, and Korea all in the first six months of the year. 

Jung's exploration of abstract painting integrates image and ground through processes that suggest the inexorable repetition of birth and rebirth. The signs in their positive and negative aspects permeate the tissue of Hur’s art. 

Jung’s paintings have included his personal symbol, a stylized pair of shapes that represents a key and keyhole. He uses these symbols to activate many ideas, but one of the most obvious things is to deny the assumption of single-point perspective. 

A single keyhole is a model for single-point perspective. Jung rarely uses one keyhole in his paintings; he often covers his large canvases with the symbol to a great clusters or grids. He tilts them, so the shape becomes an oval — a circle seen at an angle. 

He often put different shadows on them; the shadows also rebel against the idea of a single light source. I also switch between the key and keyhole shapes to further vary the idea and to convey the notion of Yin-Yang which formed the basis of his philosophical understanding of the world.