Your name
Jeong Hur
Place of birth
Seoul, Korea
Place where you live now
Brooklyn, NY
3 words to describe you
Being, non-being, and something
Why do you take pictures?
Photography is the medium well known as reflecting the real world directly or most precisely. I like that general idea of photography. Do you believe all people are looking at the world in the same way and every different brain interprets the world exactly the same? In this point of view, photography has the role as one of the social promises about how to read and recognize the world. And even though everyone’s vision is different, all they are looking for can be said to be the real world. I personally experienced serious hallucinations for a long time. In general, hallucinations do not exist, but they have existed for me. It was the real world to me. With this general idea of photography, I keep insisting on what is my reality and how I see the world. And this is why I take pictures and use photography.
Where do you get your inspiration?
My inspiration is coming from my experience, especially the point when I notice what I am recognizing is different from others. I compress the moments into the surface of photographic images. Even while I compress, a lot of things are converted to metaphors or totally different things, but they still represent something in my experience.
Who are your influences?
Every person who is interacting with me from family and close friends to passersby or taxi drivers. The story that they are telling and happenings between me and them always makes me aware of something new or something I missed
What determines the subject matter you choose?
I keep telling about myself, discovering myself. This may be seen as if I love myself. However, the reason I dig around myself is a totally different reason. I study about myself because I don’t know about myself. And I don’t have the confidence to tell about the outside of me because even I don’t know about me, how I can tell about other issues. If I start to tell something outside of me before I fully understand who I am, some issues must have happened. Maybe I can’t know fully about myself till I die. But I believe, even if I am only talking about one single person, myself, as one person who lives in a part of society, what I am saying can trigger another person’s thoughts.
What impact would you like your art to have?
I don’t pursue my work to make a big impact. The thing I want my work to be is to keep making different feelings for audiences when they look at my work. And also giving them the fun of finding hidden things. I wish my work is the one that audiences keep looking back on.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
All types of “things,” which can be “art,” but can also include everything I can feel through my senses. So many things in the world intrigue me even I feel I am intrigued by mainly visual things. But in the narrow point of view, myself, including my outlook and thought, never get me bored. Every day I change and all the time I notice. And recording me through my lens. How I can get bored from looking at myself.
Is there anything you want to add?
I hope people who read this and see my work don’t think the artist loves himself too much. I just feel I am not qualified yet to show and talk about others in my study.

Living as myself
Project statement

“A true thing, poorly expressed, is a lie.” ― Stephen Fry

Living as myself - That is a simple concept but a difficult thing to actually do. I've lived as many versions of myself depending on various situations and places, and I have tried to focus myself and my identity through social media as well as in situations such as school, meetings with friends, and relationships. Having lived as several people, I have also slowly forgotten myself. I have controlled and censored myself every day and lived with severe self-blame and shame when I act badly, and at some point, that emptiness engulfed me.

A long time ago, my counselor suggested that I try looking back on my life as an audience member, as if I were watching a movie. From that perspective, I viewed my life as the plot and thought of myself and the people in my life as characters. At first, familiar situations featuring an actor like me felt overindulgent, and this shook my feelings. From negative emotions, such as frustration, defeat, and jealousy, to positive emotions like contentment in success, I felt them all rush at me at once.

Repeated meetings with my counselor and watching these so-called movies allowed me to gradually look at my life more objectively. I watched the scenes of the movies and at my life from an objective perspective, and I could evaluate moments better, like, "It would have been better if this scene continued..." and "What an ideal scene..." and "Wasn't there a better way to overcome that desperate situation?" Knowing every scene that happened in the movie, no matter how similar it was to what happened to me, I was able to look safely at the scenes and decide on an ending that my own heart, and no one else, wanted.

There are times when you have to live with people and interact with them. But I still do look at myself as someone would in an audience. I fill in my past deficiencies one by one through photos that describe various scenes in my life's movie. Through photographs, I am recreating scenes that had many possibilities, and with my eye to the viewfinder, I can reconstruct scenes in slightly better ways and with careful sculptures that reflect myself in the past. Sometimes looking in the mirror, sometimes through a sculpture that resembles me, or in the scenes of a picture of everyone, I am completing myself little by little.

See more by Jeong Hur in A Visual Dialogue in issue #4 and in collab:co-op in issue #9

jeong hur
@jeong.h.something