CLOSE AD ×

Yoon-Young Hur channels architecture into her ceramics

Above The Fold

Yoon-Young Hur channels architecture into her ceramics

Terracotta Moonjar at Beyond Tradition exhibition at Numeroventi gallery, Florence, Italy (2019) (Courtesy the Artist)

On a sunny Thursday afternoon, Yoon-Young Hur, or YY as she’s known by friends, met AN Interior contributor Emily Conklin for lunch at a French bistro in the West Village, not far from Greenwich House Pottery, the studio that gave her a start with weekend classes while she was working as a full-time architect. She’s come a long way since that introduction and now maintains her own studio practice at Sculpture Space, and gallery representation abroad, and was invited to teach the 2019 summer intensive studio course at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union, where Conklin was her student.

Hur straddles the creative worlds of both art and architecture with a soft, minimalist sensibility. A holder of two B.A’s—a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.Arch from the Cooper Union—her past practice continuously inform her current work.

“At the Art Institute, I had this great connection with a professor who came from the Cooper Union,” Hur said. “For a while, I had been trying to figure out what his approach was and where it was coming from. When I found out, that’s where I went.”

Hur’s ceramics are deeply rooted in her Korean heritage. After art and architecture school, She returned home to reconnect with family and culture, and South Korea is where she honed many of her formal technical skills. “There’s this embrace of imperfection in Korean art, which differs greatly from Chinese art, for example,” Hur said. “A moon jar’s seam, as well as the depressions and collapses that can happen within the kiln—are things to be celebrated, not discarded.”

Some of her earliest work revolved around this archetype; that is said to be representative of a Korean aesthetic at large. A spherical vessel with a narrow opening at the top, this type of jar is traditionally created by throwing two semicircular bowls, inverting one, and assembling them together before firing. While it is possible to throw the entire jar with no seam, she finds that imperfect connection to be a tangible interaction with a long lineage of ceramicists. “It represents a raw and direct record of the fleeting moment,” she said. “By not over-refining my process, I perceive new surprises and results that are often beyond my expectations and preconceived ideas.”

Read the full interview on our interiors and design website, aninteriormag.com.

CLOSE AD ×