Minor Attractions
Jungwon Jay Hur
08.10.2024–13.10.2024
Jungwon Jay Hur at Minor Attractions
Installation view
Photo: Gillies Adamson Semple
Slugtown are pleased to be invited to take part in Minor Attractions, presenting a solo booth of work from Jungwon Jay Hur.
Jungwon Jay Hur’s work is influenced by various modes of intercultural production, stretching from art historical paintings, through Korean and Western folk music, to 20th century European cinema. With an interest in storytelling, Jay intertwines autobiographical and fictional elements, allowing her to reframe and reinterpret visual material into her own personal painting language.
Her paintings are created through a perpetual back and forth of addition and reduction. Gossamer layers of paint are built up steadily layer upon layer, before being wiped down and added back in to. They feature a myriad cast of people and places; hills in Scotland, figures from dreams, childhood windows. By working in this cyclical manner, Jay understands painting as both being akin to human relationships, and as a language of loss and longing. Each layer of paint glaze contributes to an incremental accumulation of information, before being removed, and revealing the translucent stained surface beneath. A multitude of previous histories and memories blended onto the one picture plane.
Recently, Jay has been unravelling the connection between land and identity, through paint, printmaking and textile works. In her ongoing Folding Screen works and Bojagi series, she combines aquatint etchings with traditional Korean materials, such as Hanji, Oksa and Mosi. The etchings feature tightly cropped bodies and landscapes, and the artist recognises a kinship between the aquatint process and her approach to painting – images created in layers over time through the steady erosion of a surface.
Raised in a Korean Buddhist household, folding screens were always present during the annual commemoration of family members. through which energies both leave and enter. Similarly, Bojagi are traditional Korean cloths, made from scrap fabrics, used to wrap and protect valued objects. Here, they are brought together with aquatints into decorative patterns, through a labour-intensive hand stiching process that nods to the dreamlike quality of prayer and mantra. In using these materials, Jay unpacks her experience of diaspora, as a female artist living and working in the UK. Her cultural heritage has been, in the past, something that she has overlooked. Re-examined now, it is used to it in her practice to delve into her interests in longing, home, place and connection.
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Minor Attractions is a week-long art fair hosted in The Mandrake Hotel inviting global commercial galleries and not-for-profit art spaces taking place from the 8-13th October, 2024. The fair is designed as a space where art and nightlife meet, allowing the swells of international collectors in the city to mingle with the art workers and artists that make the art world tick.
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Minor Attractions
8 – 13 October 2024
11:00 – 18:00 each day
The Mandrake Hotel, 20-21 Newman Street, London, W1T 1PG