Gyun Hur’s art seeks healing in response to anti-immigrant violence

A sense of loss stemming from her family’s immigration from South Korea to settle in Atlanta when she was 13 has pervaded the former Atlanta artist’s potent abstract art and installation. For “Spring Hiatus” (2011), a performative installation commissioned by Flux Projects in 2011, she and her parents hand-shredded hundreds of silk flowers, the kind commonly laid at grave sites, and laid them in precise stripes on the floor at Lenox Square to re-create her mother’s traditional wedding blanket. It was an act of mourning and repair.

Now living in Brooklyn, Hur has returned to Atlanta with “Our mothers, our water, our peace,” a two-year project commissioned by Flux Projects and executed in Atlanta. Part of “Flow,” a series devoted to Atlanta’s relationship with water, the project will culminate in an installation of 150 teardrop-shaped, handblown glass vessels filled with tinted water in spring 2025. They will be mounted on the walls and ceiling in multiple undulating groupings to create an environment for gathering and meditation.

The current work debuts a more expansive vision than in earlier works. Hur, 41, is attempting to create a platform for communal healing. The catalyst: the murder of six women of Asian descent in a white man’s rampage at Atlanta area spas in March 2021. The tragedy, which became the face of anti-Asian hate crimes that proliferated during COVID, left Hur traumatized and angry. She wondered whether her adopted country could ever really be home. As a mother, she worried for her daughter’s safety. Like so many of her peers in the Asian American community, she urgently felt the need to speak out — to do something.

Up to that point unsure about the exact nature of her future Atlanta project, she found her direction. “I decided I needed to do more than…