Hanna Hur, 'Two Angels'
Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles, November 11 – December 23, 2023
Through simple, geometric means, Hanna Hur’s exhibition, Two Angels, at Kristina Kite Gallery arrives at some of the most pertinent questions facing contemporary art and does so quietly, without bombast or self-regard. While the back room contains drawings that are like variations on a theme or proposals for further elaboration, the central experience of the show is to be found in two diptychs in the front room, Angel and Angel ii (both 2023). Qualitatively different examples of the same composition, each work is painted upon two square panels almost too large for one person to hold. The panels do not touch, but rather are hung with a finger-width gap between them clearly yet barely delineating each panel as separate. The paint itself is thin and layered, at times seeming to seep into the unprimed canvas. The images are straightforward; atop an alternating-color grid of fist-sized squares, seven thin horizontal lines are laid on in a manner that overlaps the grid just enough as to seem slightly apart from it, unbound by its logic even while measured by it. Semi-circles appear to bleed off the edge of each canvas nearest the center of the diptych as though reaching across real space to join their paired mirror on the opposite side of the gap. These circles and thin lines comprise the titular “angels” in each painting. One of the angels appears as terra-cotta red atop a stark parquet of charcoal black and raw cotton white. The other is as thin chalk before a washy checkerboard of salmon-roe pink and hazard yellow. The two diptychs face each other from opposing walls and are the only objects in the room save for a wooden bench placed between them so as to provide seating with a view of either one painting or the other.
Language stalls here, or at least remains redundant in a confrontation with this exhibition. As Sasha Frere-Jones wrote recently of Andre 3000’s new album, “Technically accurate description threatens to insult the music.”1 Descriptions, composed of symbols, proliferate meaninglessly in the presence of the non-symbolic and the concrete. However, the experience of Hur’s finely tuned exhibition of these two paintings, of twisting between them and comparing the vision of both, did bear some resemblance to the language of an ancient love poem quoted by the priest Takuan in his 16th century letter to the swordsman Yagyū Munenori.
To think that I am not going To think of you any more Is still thinking of you. Let me then try not to think That I am not going to think of you.
Both paintings are clearly similar, yet so strikingly and experientially different that comparing the two becomes an exercise in this kind of thought, or rather, non-thought. Each work is composed of discrete images mirrored across the real space between the two panels, altogether forming a whole. It would be reasonable to describe either diptych as one image, but it is more accurate to say that they are precisely not one image, but also not two. Just so as well for the exhibition, which is a situation of viewing not two, but also not one image. Just as each diptych is mirrored across its constituent panels to create the painting, the composition of each painting is again mirrored across the room to create the exhibition. The floor of the gallery itself contributes to this dynamic, since the ground at Kristina Kite Gallery has always been bisected by two opposing patterns of linoleum grid. Grids which in this instance appear to place each painting into a sculptural world of its own paired impossibly, but precisely imperfectly, with its painted vertical counterpart. The inclusion of the bench placed parallel to the paintings in the middle of the exhibition space not only draws attention to the floor and to this fact, but provides a physical place to turn and view the mental and imagistic space of one or the other painting and its paired flooring. In turning eyes, mind, and body back and forth between these works something invisibly important about the structure of images and imagination starts to come into focus. Both works are required to perceive this dynamic just as both works are necessarily unique. As Hur herself states in the press release for the show, “The original image will not be looked at directly, it requires mediation, refraction.”
Hur begs the question, what exactly is being mediated or refracted? D.T. Suzuki, explicating the poem quoted above, states, “ ‘To think’ is omou in Japanese. Omou means not only ‘to think’ but ‘to recollect,’ ‘to long for,’ ‘to love,’ etc. It has an affective as well as an intellectual value. The word is almost a general term for anything that goes on in one’s mind. Therefore, not to think (omowanu) is to keep the mind utterly empty of all contents–a blank state of emptiness which is mushin or munen.”2 This is not a call to thoughtlessness, but rather to the state of mind possible when concentration is so full that the mind can only be empty and reasoning language has no place. To choose only one of the paintings, to think of its qualities alone, is still to think of the other painting by placing them into a dualistic relationship. Trying not think of either painting (which is of course thinking of both), with eyes full of one or the other, is perhaps something like the active emptiness, or munen, required to impossibly face both paintings at once. This would be to simultaneously stand in the actual gallery space containing both artworks and also in the two very separate perceptual spaces produced by each work, a situation only acheivable through this particular installation in this specific space. What was being mediated or refracted by this exhibition then was, it seems, ourselves and the openness we are capable of bringing along with us to art, life, or reality itself along with all its attendant illusions.
It goes unstated anywhere in the official materials for the show, but the bench upon which bodies and perception pivot at the heart of the space is built to the same size and dimensions as the benches inside the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. This is necessary to mention only as antithesis or antipode to much of the art that draws its value from foreknowledge of its source or a perfect understanding of its intended meaning. Here, Hur quietly transposes a physical familiarity from a revered site of art into the gallery, perhaps in the hope that the reverence itself makes the journey as well, not through the transposition, but through the quietude.
Very little seems sacred in our age of mass death and woeful misunderstanding in the face of malintent. Images, especially those attached to emotions, are used everywhere as shorthand for information. They are constantly “at work” on us, more than they ever have been, and we take them for reality. Choosing images to compare or somehow apply to life is a complex and variable process, how should it be done? The answer provided by abstraction, at least the kind practiced by Hur, is that it should be done directly and by example. We know that reality is capable of imitation in the same intuitive manner that we know wisdom is possible or that communication can exceed its technical definition. Perhaps the simplest visual means are required to imitate the most basic elements of our shared reality and our common humanity, and perhaps to see both image and reality at once, impossibly facing both angels, in a state of munen, is something like the experience necessary for facing our historical moment with eyes wide open. Hur’s exhibition, like the best art of our time, helps us see that.
Daisetz Suzuki gets the last word here, “The principle of satori is not to rely upon concepts in order to reach the truth of things, for concepts are useful in defining the truth of things but not in making us personally acquainted with it. Conceptual knowledge may make us wise in a way, but this is only superficial. It is not the living truth itself, and therefore there is no creativeness in it, being a mere accumulation of dead matter.”3
Red Cameron
Frere-Jones, Sasha. “André 3000.” 4Columns, 4columns.org/frere-jones-sasha/andre-3000.
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. Zen and Japanese Culture. Princeton University Press, 2019. p. 112
ibid. p. 218