Invisible String, Tangled Into Sight
Artist: Jeong Hur, Nana Shimomura
Curated by Zhiheng Ashely Zhang
Time: Sep.19- Oct.19, 2025
Opening Reception: Sep.19, 6-9pm RSVP Here
Location: Sojourner Gallery, 178 Bleecker St, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012
This exhibition is now on view by appointment only. Please email ash@sojournergallery.com
Invisible String, Tangled Into Sight considers how inherited cultures, with their rituals, materials, and embodied instincts, remain present in both life and art, even when carried far from their origins. By foregrounding East Asian traditions reimagined in contemporary contexts, the exhibition reflects on the persistence of cultural memory across distance and displacement. Through material investigation and form experimentation, the works on view make perceptible the invisible threads that bind self to history and individual practice to collective heritage.
Jeong Hur works with pinewood and hanji paper, historically used to cover windows in Korean homes, to reflect on the permeability of memory and cultural identity. His carved frames, layered with translucent surfaces, hover between opening and closure, inside and outside. These liminal forms evoke the condition of living across languages and geographies, embodying the hesitations and negotiations of cultural in-betweenness, where boundaries soften and thresholds transform into fertile sites of becoming.
Nana Shimomura extends the lineage of Japanese calligraphy into the expanded field of contemporary art, incorporating sound, performance, and spatial awareness. Her practice explores the temporal and perceptual dimensions of mark-making, recalling both the primal instinct of inscription and the celestial patterns of constellations as shared structures of orientation. In doing so, she repositions calligraphy as a living gesture that exceeds visual boundaries. Each work becomes an inscription of time and distance, a rhythm extending beyond the page.
Curated by Zhiheng Ashely Zhang, a Chinese curator, this exhibition offers an East Asian perspective within a Western context. Rather than reinforcing binaries, it traces the unseen string that has grown within us since birth and highlights cultural entanglement as generative. Here, the invisible string becomes a framework through which memory, material, and tradition are re-seen and re-imagined, binding disparate geographies and histories into a shared field of resonance.
About the artists:
Jeong Hur’s practice investigates perception, memory, and the fragile thresholds between interior and exterior. Through hand-constructed wooden frames layered with translucent hanji paper, his works resemble windows or boundaries—suspended structures that invite us to consider presence, absence, and the quiet spaces in between.
Seoul-born and Brooklyn-based, Hur’s work has been exhibited internationally across the United States, France, Germany, China, Japan, and Korea. As his practice expands toward spatial and architectural forms, he continues to explore how memory can be held, suspended, and transformed through material and space.
Nana Shimomura conceives of paper as a four-dimensional space, with calligraphy as an act that plunges into its depth. Treating calligraphy as a form of composting, she allows expressions to accumulate, decompose, and transform, illuminating them from unconventional angles and exploring the shared ground of human perception.
Currently based in New York, Shimomura has lived in Tokyo and Barcelona, and her work has been recognized with grants from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan, among others. She has exhibited widely, including at Roppongi Art Night, Blanc Gallery, and Sotheby’s Institute, and has participated in residencies, performances, and talks at Residency Unlimited (New York), Hangar (Barcelona), and the Antoni Tàpies Foundation (Barcelona).
About the Curator:
Zhiheng Ashely Zhang is a New York–based curator and bilingual writer. She is currently the Director & Curator at Sojourner Gallery. She has also worked with and participated in programs at institutions including Residency Unlimited (New York), Accent Sister (New York), Sleep Center (New York), UCCA Lab (Beijing), CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), Poly Time Museum (Beijing), Jinghua Art (Shanghai) and Spatium Ginza (Tokyo). Her writing has been published in Tussle Magazine, Art China, ART DBL, IDEAT China, and Beijing Youth Net.
The opening reception is supported by iichiko USA.
