New York, November 3, 2025

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In contrast to the noise of busy Bleecker Street below it, Sojourner Gallery's show Invisible String, Tangled Into Sight cultivated a peaceful quietude, inviting visitors to carefully contemplate the work on display. Opening during New York Asia Week, the exhibition presented a contemporary East Asian fusion of art, featuring works by Korean artist Jeong Hur and Japanese artist Nana Shimomura. Curated by Chinese curator Zhiheng Ashely Zhang, the exhibition offered a perspective that intertwined traditional East Asian culture with themes of migration and cross-cultural identity. In bridging geographical distance and temporal divides, the exhibition dynamically merged traditional craft with contemporary perspective.

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In the intimate, sun-drenched gallery, Hur's hung sculptures of pinewood and traditional Korean hanji paper and Shimomura's contemporary adaptation of traditional Japanese calligraphy in multimedia works fostered a generative dialogue. Within this space, binaries were profoundly complicated, questioned, and ultimately forsaken in favor of an inclusive recognition of shared experience across cultural boundaries.

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Hur's sculptures are wooden frames he carves to resemble windows. Colored, partially opaque, hanji paper serves as windowpanes, echoing the traditional Korean use of the material Hur witnessed growing up. However, not every space between the carefully carved beams of pinewood is covered by the paper, juxtaposing the opacity of the hanji paper with the clarity of its absence. In doing so, Hur's constructions simultaneously enact visibility and invisibility, certainty and uncertainty, leaving us suspended between the two states. Pushing us further into this limbo are the abstracted hands Hur has carved and placed around the window frames, as if they are reaching for, or gripping—but not opening, or closing—them. This suspension between inside and outside encourages us to experience the windows themselves, rather than prioritize the visibility they can afford us. 

 

In Through a pinhole (2025), for example, the wooden hands snake over the form of the window, gripping both sides of the structure as it juts perpendicularly from the gallery wall. In Sensing someone's presence (2025), Hur's smallest piece in the exhibition, the wooden hands are rendered in increased detail. Complete with fingernails, the five hands clutch the piece by its frame. It is as if they are reaching for the simple human figure emerging from a transparent field of the window. Combined with its title, these formal features of Sensing someone's presence evoke a narrative of mystical connection with others in mysterious circumstances, across the boundaries that might otherwise separate us.

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As the motif of the window serves as an inspiration for Hur’s work, curator Zhiheng Ashely Zhang interprets it as a metaphorical threshold between two cultures. When people from one culture observe another, their perception is often mediated by a certain filter and distance—like looking through a window. These windows represent cultural boundaries that separate and define different communities. However, Hur’s work proposes an alternative reading of these cultural windows. Rather than functioning as barriers or filtered frames of curiosity, the window becomes a site of possibility—an opening through which new cultural dialogues and contemporary exchanges can emerge.

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Hur's pieces largely occupied the walls of the gallery, save for two works: Hands that stay (2025) and Held Too Long (2025), that stand and hang, respectively, beside the gallery window. While the Hur uses white hanji paper for Hands that stay, he uses colorful hanji paper for Held Too Long. From the base of the window to the top, the blue shades of the hanji paper gently rise into yellow. As dawn arrives, these colors merge with the shifting light outside, casting a quiet radiance across the room. In that moment, the gallery itself becomes a window, suffused with the tenderness of the blue hour, where day and night briefly breathe together. In these moments of suspension between temporal states, the exhibition's overall ethos finds greater resonance, as we are reminded to embrace the thresholds between them.