Our mothers, our water, our peace

Entering the space for Gyun Hur’s “Our mothers, our water, our peace,” viewers encountered a long L-shaped installation featuring 147 hand-blown glass teardrops in varied shades of yellow rhythmically arrayed at eye level along the white walls. Each was filled with small amounts of water collected from Atlanta’s Chattahoochee River. Larger teardrop vessels hung on wires from the ceiling a few feet out from the walls, clustered like small groups in quiet conversation. The beauty of these forms was reinforced by their low-hanging weight and their darker yellow moving to greenish brown. Two related but more substantial glass pods stood grounded in the space. Viewers felt warmly enveloped, welcomed to a gathering. The meditative soundscape by collaborator Hahn Rowe invited contemplation and care befitting this unique memorial project.

Hur’s installation filled a sunlit, wood-floored room at the Goat Farm, an old industrial complex turned Atlanta art center, for two weeks in March 2025. Commissioned by Flux Projects, the show opened nearly four years to the day after the horrific Atlanta-area spa shootings that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent, four of them Korean. This tragic violence capped a series of attacks nationwide that grew out of longstanding racial prejudices fed anew by Covid-era anti-Asian rhetoric.

Born in South Korea, Hur immigrated with her family to the Atlanta area when she was 13. She studied art at the University of Georgia and then at SCAD Atlanta for graduate school before going on to work as an artist and educator in Hong Kong and, now for a decade, New York City. She had grown up close to one of the spas targeted in the attacks.

The shootings sparked anger, anguish and grief for Hur as a Korean American. They also led to soul-searching. In an extraordinary public letter posted in December 2021 and entitled “Dear Georgia,” Hur moved between feelings of betrayal and longing for the promise of her adopted home: “[T]he tragedy is we still believe in what you have told us we deserve – a right to pursue our happiness no matter the cost.” [i]

The loss also felt personal. “I can’t get over how those aunties at the spas might have been my mother, her friends,” she said in that same letter. But she noted “how my mother keeps on living without saying a word about it.” Hur was determined to be visible as community elders were being attacked, humiliated and killed. She felt compelled to go to the streets to protest, to make art, to not stay silent. She needed to speak out in a way that her parents’ generation of immigrants, people who worked hard but kept their heads down, had not had the capacity to do. She confronted the imperative of finding her own generational voice.

Any artist contemplating a work of memorialization has to consider Maya Lin’s iconic Vietnam War memorial, which etched the names of the dead or missing in black granite along a path submerged like a tomb on the Washington D.C. mall. Hur is inspired by Lin’s art in general, but her approach in “Our mothers” was completely different. The names of those killed in the spa shootings appeared nowhere in the work, even in the explanatory wall text, because Hur wanted to honor the grieving families’ privacy and protect their security. “Our mothers” also sought a broader resonance. It acknowledged the loss and the outpouring of communal grief by embodying so many tears, but the project also celebrated the community’s resilience. It was as much about the living as the dead.

Reinforcing this fact, Hur placed these vessels, created in collaboration with Brooklyn-based glassmakers Yiyi Wei and Evan Voelbel, in Asian American community centers and homes in the Atlanta area, with the help of liaison Nicole Kang Ahn. Those emotionally scarred by this violence, and by America’s long history of excluding or marginalizing Asian Americans, literally held these vessels and engaged in ritual water transfers. The teardrops served as objective correlatives of grief but also as a means, through safe and intimate spaces, for the tears and conversations that would move grief into strength. The exhibition highlighted these activities through photographs of community members, as well as programming designed to bring the Asian American, the art and the broader Atlanta communities together.

Hur’s art is always layered. It seamlessly mixes the surface beauty of carefully selected materials and colors with pleasing formal properties that unite them. Yet “Our mothers” also came out of a deeply personal place. Before the spa shootings, she was dealing with private grief. She started collecting water from the Delaware River and placing it in small glass vessels which she first displayed at Wave Hill in the Bronx in the installation “So we can be near” (2021). The ritual of collecting river water amounted to a processing of loss, but also a movement toward rebirth. Hur remembers the rivers of her childhood as “sites of mourning, washing, and rejoicing,” according to the exhibition notes. Like holy water in a Catholic church, these beautiful vessels manifested a hope for healing and new life. “Our mothers” thus enlarged and transformed Hur’s personal practice into the broader context of communal grief work.

Her layering here was highly syncretic. The vessels’ rhythmic arrangement on the wall followed the musical notations for “I’ve Got Peace Like a River,” a Black spiritual that Hur grew up singing and playing on piano for her Korean church choir. The exhibition also included “There is a land beyond the river” (2021), a smaller piece featuring the yellow glass vessels that represented Hur’s first attempt to reckon with the tragic shootings. The title comes from a Christian hymn welcoming the deceased into heaven with golden bells ringing and angels singing. Written by a white American immigrant in the late 19^th century, it too was carried to Korea by white American missionaries even as it became a mainstay of Black Southern churches.

In dialogues during the exhibition, Hur revealed that Sunday church service provided an opportunity for her mother and women in the Korean, and then Korean American communities to get dressed up, appear in their full nobility unburdened by their daily work, and share their strength with each other. The hymns speak to a warm embrace of the departed and the peace and renewal represented by the river water, but they also suggest this communal and especially female solidarity.

Of course, growing up in the Atlanta area, Hur was exposed to Black culture. As she thought about what it means to be Asian or “yellow” in American society, she found inspiration in the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s. The many shades of yellow in “Our mothers,” then, reflect not just golden bells ringing but racial pride in the beauty and strength of yellow and brown people.

I first encountered Hur’s work in 2010 at Atlanta’s Get This! Gallery. The installation “Repose” reproduced her mother’s wedding blanket by way of vibrantly colored silk cemetery flowers that Hur had shredded into tiny pieces that she used like pigment to create rows of colored lines that filled a room. I was moved and amazed by this piece. Having recently helped start Flux Projects, I asked if Hur would be interested in doing a larger version of this work in a very public space.

The result was “Spring Hiatus” (2011), a monumental 16 x 36 foot installation in the “Santa Claus space” in the middle of Lenox Square, one of the South’s busiest malls, which attracts over 100,000 shoppers a week. Inspired by the wedding blanket, the project had great personal and cultural meaning for Hur. It was also a bold display of color field art, a key movement in 20^th century Western art. The project proved incredibly painstaking, with Hur enlisting her nuclear family, along with some volunteers, for months of flower shredding. Installation on site took eight days, during which Hur and her parents were on display in front of an ever changing mall audience. It amounted to a public performance of meticulous labor, like monks working on a mandala.

Such a large public art piece in a busy mall stirred curious responses, with some viewers asking Hur or the docents what they were selling. What stood out for me was the bold fragility of this work, which appeared so vibrant and solid on the surface. The docents held small plastic cups of the cut silk that audience members could touch. It was exciting to watch a viewer realize this artwork was composed of millions of bits of fabric laid delicately on the floor without adhesive and thus could blow away. Two amazed twelve-year old girls literally shrieked and ran off. It seemed mind-blowing that an artist would offer an audience such a vulnerable gift.

Given Hur’s interest in ephemeral installations, it’s notable that performance has been a consistent part of her practice. The titles to some of her performance pieces speak to their emotional intimacy: “Loving Deeply,” “To hold gently,” “Mourning Cart.” Acts of love, labor and mourning manifest as quiet solitary or shared ritual, durational performances, all on public display. Hur even spent a day with performance artist Marina Abramovic as one of the finalists to enact Abramovic’s retrospective “The Artist is Present” (2010) at the Museum of Modern Art, and she worked closely with artist Carrie Mae Weems in re-enacting one of Weems’s pieces.  Hur’s artistic explorations have often involved bold use of her body, even if she did not appear at all in the related installation. As late as 2021, her beautiful Wave Hill piece created a space to hold Hur as she lay meditating on loss and memory.

“Our mothers” entailed a significant break from this practice, as became clear from Hur’s comments at the exhibition’s public dialogues. The spa shootings led her to reconsider the physical vulnerability of public performance and to move away from it. Around the same time, Hur became a mother. She said that she had never before felt the strength and resilience of her own body as a woman as she did with her daughter. In creating “Our mothers,” Hur began to think of the two larger glass vessels sitting on the floor as stand-ins for her mother (in the center) and maternal grandmother (on the side), with two hanging vessels near the center as stand-ins for herself and her daughter. She had found a way to gather the community with her family in her art in a less ephemeral form.

Finally, it’s important to note that sometimes art speaks to its moment in ways not even the artist could have predicted. “Our mothers” opened just two months after the start of a new presidential administration marked by intentionally aggressive, often controversial actions that have bred fear and uncertainty for many. The ethos of care and quiet thoughtfulness, of community engagement, of beauty and grace embedded in “Our mothers” provided a stark contrast to such aggression. Like the best art often does, Hur’s work tapped into and fostered the viewer’s humanity, reminding us of the richness of our connections to each other. The project offered a needed model of care and resilience even as it memorialized the same. In a fraught and divisive moment of our political life, this project also felt like a precious gift, an unexpected but necessary reminder that there is a different way to be, that power can nurture and heal instead of divide.

[i] Hur, Gyun. “Dear Georgia,” (December 27, 2021). https://www.gyunhur.com/dear-georgia