text from ‘Jeju Biennale 2017 Tourism’ book (Page 264-265), 2017

Host, Jeju Special Self-Governing Province 주최, 제주특별자치도

Organiser, Jeju Museum of Art 주관, 제주도립미술관

“Where the clouds are, I stop my feet…” “구름이 머무는 곳에 내 발길 멈추고…”

artist statement

Clouds have been watching people since time began. The clouds I met there in the scenery of Jeju has been etched in my memory. That memory has been a positive source of energy, a good friend to comfort and encourage me. This positive energy has become part of my culture and is always in my life like a shadow. While traveling, I try to create my own positive culture, a colourful culture, living in me like a shining shadow. Traveling endlessly keeps me motivated like cloud’s movements and changes. From ancient times, the pattern of clouds have been used to represent sacredness, abundance, the peace found i nature and transcendence,. The meaning of clouds symbolises the power of the sky. In this pattern, we can also find arrogance as well as superstition. Also, it symbolises the mystery of the sky. For me, it is most meaningful as a tool to trace between heaven and earth. I want to express the charm I feel from traveling around Jeju by attaching this meaning of clouds and shadows to my work.

Jeonghee Churches

작가노트

구름은 대지가 시작된 이래로 사람들의 삶을 지켜보고 있습니다. 제주의 풍경속에서 만난 구름이미지는 내 기억속에 새겨져 있습니다. 그 기억은 긍정정인 에너지원이었으며, 나를 위로하고 격려해주는 좋은 친구가 되었습니다. 이 긍정의 에너지는 내 문화의 일부가 되었으며, 그림자처럼 늘 내 삶속에 존재하고 있습니다. 여행하는 동안, 나는 빛나는 그림자처럼 나와함께 할 나 자신의 긍정적인 문화, 색채가 풍부한 문화를 만들어 갑니다. 여행은 구름의 움직임과 변화처럼 끊임없이 나에게동기를 부여합니다. 고대부터 구름의 패턴은 신성함, 풍요함, 자연의 평화, 초월감 등을 표현하는데 사용되었습니다. 구름의 의미는 단순한 하늘에서부터 천상의 삶, 그리고 장수의 삶에 이르기까지 다양합니다. 또한, 구름의 패턴은 하늘의 힘을 상징합니다. 이러한 패턴에서 고고함뿐만 아니라 상서로움도 발견할 수 있습니다. 그 중에서도 하늘의 신비를 상징합니다. 나에겐 천상과 지구 사이를 여행하는 도구로서 가장 의미가 있습니다. 나는 작품을 통해 이러한 구름과 그림자의 의미를 부여하며 제주를 여행하면서 느끼는 매력을 표현해보고자 합니다.

정희 처치스

text from magazine 'Sculpture' (Page 83), 2000

 Selected for one of Exhibition Reviews, ISC (International Sculpture Center), publisher of Sculpture Magazine, Washington DC, USA

Singapore, Heo Jeong-Hee, Caldwell House

It is through clay that Korean artist Heo Jeong-Hee attempts to reveal and express the mysteries of Mother Earth in her sculptures. Her approach is to push her medium to its limits and see how far she can go.

The work Heo creates, both organic and formal, relies heavily on a careful use of colored glazes to impart emotion and to give reuse to forms that are both lyrical and narrative. The shapes and titles of her works refer to mysteries and legends of ancient Greece. The reference may be as transparent as the title and form of Amphora (1998), as abstract and visual as Hermes' Hymn (1998) and Demeter's Hymn (1998), or as arcane and elusive as the Alchemist's Triptych (1998). These allusions are a far cry from the artist's native Korea, yet there is something uniquely Korean in the visual language and in the artist's response to and manipulation of the clay. Heo's "Mountain" series uses the simple geometry of the triangle to suggest the perspective of a single mountain and, at the same time, to suggest a complete landscape as in Mountain #3 (1998).

All of Heo's works are executed on a human scale, but as one walks around them a sense of monumentality emerges. The work is firmly grounded, but it leads the eye upward. Transmutation (1998), for example, with its rounded base opens out into an imperfect square, which alleviates the sense of heaviness. This impression of opening up or emerging from the earth is borne out in Source#1 and #2 (1998), the swirling movement of the upper part imitating the upswelling of water from the ground, the opening of a flower or the cup of life from which we all drink.

If the shape of Source suggests a cyclical movement. the delicate balance of Zepherus (1998) implies a delicate gust of wind, a sense of movement all the more extraordinary because of the weight of the material. Heo's sensitive handling and use of expression create this illusion.

Ultimately, it is the artist's sense of balance, both visual and emotive, that makes the potentially clumsy, awkward shapes poetic. The forms provide enough of a cue to waken the imagination, but still leave enough for the mind to explore its own pathways and openings leading to another world.

Sian Jay

Dr. Jay is an Oxford educated anthropologist with a passionate interest in art, architecture and design history. Formerly a researcher in the departments of Ethnography and Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum in London, and an Editor for the Macmillan Dictionary of Art, she is now based in Singapore. Dr. Jay both writes on and teaches the history and theory of art, architecture and design at various institutions including Lasalle College of the Arts, and runs anthropology courses for the University of Buffalo - NY in Singapore. 

text from Singapore exhibition catalog 1999-2000

introduction

Since ancient times Gaia, the Great Earth Mother, has been summoned to provide blessings of fertility and celebrated for her life sustaining gifts. This deity, the female principle, was the origin and nurturer of life. Gaia, received her name from the Greeks. According to them, Gaia was the earth, she anticipated the needs of the human race and provided a habitable, verdant, fertile earth. She brought dormant seeds to life, made the fields green, provided food and created the seas -- all nature sprang from her body. Although, Prometheus, the clever crafts-man god, is credited with creating the first man and Zeus the first woman, it is Gaia's life gifts that sustain all. 

Since childhood, the Korean artist, Heo Jeong-Hee has been drawn to nature -- touching, looking, smelling, and listening -- sharpening her senses so that she might catch the murmurs of her ancient land.

Clay, the earth is Ms. Heo's medium of choice. She is attached to it for its plasticity, its spontaneity -- its ability to receive and record her lively manipulations. Her mastery of this allusive media is amazing. To watch the artist, Heo Jeong-Hee transform raw, moist clay into sculpture is inexperience akin to observing an sorcerer conjuring matter from ether.

She regularly works in series, developing subtle poetic nuances of form and color. Earth's cyclic rhythms, biological fecundity, and nurture are reoccurring Gaian hemes explore by Ms. He.

Her sculptural approach is reductive. She works to achieve a near minimalist refinement. However, contrary to the minimalist aesthetic, she allows the fleeting anecdotal mark of the tool or finger and the occasionally accruing, unfinished ragged edges. Her process results in sculpture which is free from affectation, simple, bold, and strong.

Like a potter, she too enjoys exploring volumes. Yet, her hand built vessels transcend common domestic utility. These forms suggest a higher function -- perhaps sacred vessels prepared for ancient rituals.

A number of Ms. Heo's vessels are based on the mandorla. The shape is realized within the cross-section of these simple forms. There is a direct Gaian reference intended in these works. The mandorla is a symbol buried deep in our collective subconscious -- a universal symbol of the female. This symbol even predates history. The earliest recordings of it are on the walls of womb-like caves where it has been ritually scratched by paleolithic artist-shaman. To our early ancestors this mark to evoke Gaia so that she could work her magic. The sculptor, Heo Jeong-Hee has made this mark so that we too may recall and honor Gaia's nurturing gifts.

Enough words -- the visual poetry of Heo Jeong-Hee's sculptures must speak for themselves -- and they speak most eloquently.

Roger A. Churches, MFA

La Sierra University, Riverside, California, USA, professor, Chair, Art Department.

exhibition review

There are different kinds of alchemy. There is the traditional kind, in which scientists and dreamers try to transform lead and other "worthless" elements into gold. And there is the kind that recognizes that it is neither science nor magic that transforms the ordinary into the beautiful and enduring but art and passion.

Artist, Heo Jeong-Hee practices this latter form of alchemy, for each of her ceramic pieces is a commentary on the relationship between a simplicity of materials and an elegance and clarity of vision. The title for this exhibition of Heo's work is Gaia, the ancient Greek's word for Mother Earth, who was born of chaos and encompassed all forms of life and all the potential that there is in the world for new life to come forth in different shapes.

In choosing this title, Heo is playing with both universal questions about the creation of the world and the beginnings of life. Although her titles often refer specifically to the beliefs of the classical societies, her works address universal human concerns, seeking to answer humanity's eternal questions.

Her stoneware pieces suggest classical outlines, hinting at those flawless legions of Greek red ware and blackware vases and amphorae. But even as her work hints at classical ceramic forms, it also conjures sculptural images: She is an architect and sculptor of clay.

Her natural textures and transmuted earth colors take us much farther back before historical eras, to the time of Gaia herself, to the moments when earth was first born from chaos.

Many of the pieces touch on the themes common to classical mythology, in which Heo is deeply versed.

A piece like the bronze stoneware elongated sculpture Demeter's hymn is lovely, the blush of bronze metallic color thrown like an elaborate tapestry over the weightiness of stoneware. 

But it is not simply pretty, for it suggests a complex narrative. Neither entirely ungainly nor wholly graceful, the piece seems to be made up of parts that cannot quite be assembled into a graceful whole, just as Demeter's own life was a patchwork of joy in the spring and summer when she walked the world with her daughter  persephone and sorrow when Persephone was forced each autumn to descend into Hades.

There is nothing explicit in the piece to retell this mournful story, and yet every aspect of the work lets us hear the goddess's whispered lament. Despite the abstract sculptural nature of her pieces, Heo'work takes on narratives forms, telling us ancient stories.

Earth is emblematic of many things. It coaxes forth the hidden life from seeds, allowing plants to grow that will nurture us.

In religious traditions around the world, earth is the material from which a god sculpts the first humans. But earth is also the place where we lay our dead. Earth and clay represent the entire cycle of life. 

The skillful ceramic sculptor like Heo lets us see this ancient and complex relationship between humans and clay in each piece.

Heo creates a sense of life's universal rhythms in her own work by being deeply respectful of her medium.

She does not disguise the nature of her materials: Hers is not the highly refined enterprise of artists working in porcelain or glass.

Rather, she never lets us forget that what we are looking at is simple clay simple earth-simply the beginning and end of life. And yet her work is never overly sober or dour. The overriding message of her work is that we need no alchemy to transform our lives, for they are gold already.

Devorah L. Knaff, Ph.

The American writer and art critic, Dr. Devorah L. Knaff regularly writes for ArtWeek, the West Coast's most significant art publication-where she contributes perceptive commentaries on art and politics. Her art exhibition reviews and critiques are also published in several of California's major daily metropolitan newspapers.

에세이

허정희의 도예작품을 보면 그의 대자연을 향한 순정한 사랑이 절로 느껴진다. 그 사랑은 마치 수도승이 그러하 듯, 스스로 내밀한 마음 속 심연을 응시하고 그 성찰의 결과를 다시 자연에게 겸허한 마음으로 되돌려주는 귀의의 형식을 취한다.

자연 혹은 세상과의 대화, 그로부터 비롯되는 가르침을 결코 자기만의 공간에 가두어 두지않는 바로 그 지점에 예술의 사회적 미덕이 자리잡게 된다. 특히 자연의 질서에 대한 예술가의 느낌과 기억이 사회에 환원될 때 우리는 그 작가와 더불어 생태론적 순환의 법칙을 생각하며 자못 경건해지기도 한다.

허정희의 작품들은 우주를 빚는 신의 조화로운 손길에 감격하라고 나즈막하게 속삭인다. 속삭임은 '신은 질서를 강제하지 않는다. 신은 신의 공간안에 있는 모든 것들에 자유를 준다. 그 자유의 토대위에서 서로 소통하라, 그것이 질서다.' 라고 들린다.

그의 작품에 등장하는 크고 작은 구멍, 소용돌이, 중앙에서 일직선으로 뻗어나온 균열, 몸체에 붙은 작은 조각같은 것들이 연상시키는 문, 창, 길, 손짓, 날개, 손잡이, 눈, 귀 등의 이미지는 하나같이 '소통의 질서'를 상징하는 것으로 받아들여진다.

소통은 서로가 서로를 향한 움직임이지만 서로가 서로를 이해하게 하는데 중요한 목적이 있다. 따라서 소통이 연출하는 분위기는 당연히 평화적이다. 화려하지도 않다. 그의 작품의 소용돌이 조형에서조차도 어떤 고요함을 느끼는건 그의 세계관이 이같은 소통의 질서에 바탕뒀기 때문일 거라고 짐작해 본다.

생각컨대 작품의 소박. 단순함도 결국 어떤 장식적 장치를 작품에 도입한다한들 이 거대한 자연을 표현하는 데 있어 겉치레일 뿐이며 오히려 자연의 본질을 훼손하고 말 것이라는 자가의 절실한 인식에서 비롯됐을 것이다.

이번 전시의 주제가 대지의 여신 가이아인 것은 조금 비약하자면 나에게는 세기말 오염된 문명에 대한 허정희의 조용한 경고로도 들린다. 흙으로 빚어졌기에 결국 흙일 수밖에 없는 이 작품들을 보고 대지의 모성을 상기하자는 그런 경고다.

그러면서도 자연의 질서를 향한 시적 이미지가 선율을 타고 흐르는 듯한 감흥을 주는 것은 각박한 세상에 대한 위안이고 이것이 허정희의 작업이 지향하는 목적인것이라고 생각한다.

소통되지 않는 세상에서 소통을 염원하는 사람들은 외롭다. 허정희는 바로 그 지점에 서 있다.

이헌익

위의 글은 중앙일보 문화부장 이헌익님께서 기고해 주셨습니다.

essay (translated from Korean)

Heo Jeong-Hee's expressive clay works show a high regard for nature.

When viewing these serenely and evocative artworks, they urge us towards self-reflective, meditative thoughts. An experience similar to a meditating monk, our mind is channeled towards nature. These artworks work on our mind and bring us to contemplate delicate dependent relationships.

This inspired artist creates works that are clearly a special gift to the community. Ms. Heo's unique vision directs us be reflective. When contemplating these artworks we may even hear whispers, urging us to take an active, nurturing role towards protecting our great 'mother earth'.

This sculptors work subtly directs us towards an amazing creator who made us and ordered the great universe. Our comprehension of these thoughts gives us a great freedom to be and to act. This may be the origin of our impulse to create and to bring order from chaos. But order cannot be forced. God gives complete freedom for everything. 

Throughout the collection of this work one finds big and small holes, swirls, cracks radiating from the center, and small fragments attached to the body. These images are evocative of gates, windows, roads, motions of hands, wings, handles, eyes, and ears -- all accepted symbols of communication. 

Communication is an action that requires more than one. It is aimed towards consensus and understanding. Quite naturally, the atmosphere of communication is one of peace. The artist's non-static sculpture forms convey a feeling of calm. This may be because the artist's world view is based on her search to bring order from chaos.

Even though occasionally minimal decoration is introduced into her broad, simple forms, they are visually strong.

Gaia is the title for this exhibition. The earth, clay, is the artist's primary medium, and Gaia is the goddess of the earth. The artist through her sculpture brings nature closer to us.

Heo's poetic forms are full of meaning that flow like melodies to a calloused world. I think the purpose of the artist is to bring these timely concerns to our attention.

Her artwork speaks fluently while others are lonely and mute.

Hun-Ik Lee

The Korean text of this translated essay was contributed by Mr. Hun-Ik Lee the Editor-of-Culture for JoongAng Ilbo, one of Seoul's leading daily newspapers.

작가의 말

자연과 함께한 나의 시간은 소중하다. 그것은 깊은 영감을 준다. 나는 자연의 시각적이고 숭고한 표현에 감응한다. 나는 자연의 힘과 형태로부터 곧바로 아이디어를 끌어낸다. 내 마음은 땅과 시간, 그리고 자연의 기억에 대한 질문으로 가득 차 있다. 땅, 흙, 진흙은 중심에 있다. 그 중심은 모든 생명이 시작하는 곳이고 생명은 그 때의 상태대로 땅으로 되돌아 간다.

그러나 죽음 이 후의 기억에는 어떠한 일이 일어날까? 집합된 기억들은 영원히 땅 속에 갇히는 것인가? 그렇다면 이러한 기억들은 밝혀질 수 있는 것인가? 진흙으로 작업할 때 나는 이러한 기억들의 배출관이 될 수 있을까? 내 조각들이 자세를 취하며 기억들을 드러낼 수 있을까?

왜 가장 흥미있는 질문들에는 답을 할 수 없을까? 내가 흥미를 느끼는 것은 답에 있다기보다 언제나 질문들에 있다. 질문들은 내게 새로운 관계물을 탐구하도록 만든다. 결국, 여행과 탐구는 가장 중요하다.

나의 작품은 내 여행의 기록이고, 나의 길을 다른 동료들과 동행할 기회를 가질 때 나는 보상을 받는다.

허정희 

artist's statement

My time with nature is important. It is deeply inspiring. I respond to its expressions of the poetic and the sublime. I draw my ideas directly from nature's forces and forms. My mind is flooded with questions about the earth, time, and the nature of memory. The earth is at the center. It is where all life begins and when life is gone what remains goes back to the earth.

But, what happens to memories after death? Is it possible that eons of collective memories are locked within the earth? If so, can these memories be revealed? When working in clay can I become a conduit for these memories? Is it possible that my sculpture can possess and even reveal them?

Why are the most interesting questions unanswerable? It is always the questions rather than the answers I find interesting. Questions lead me to explore new relationships. After all, the journey and search are most important.

My artwork is a record of my journey, and I'm rewarded when I have an opportunity to share my path with fellow travelers.

Heo Jeong-Hee

text from E-2. Southern California USA, The Press-Enterprise. (Sunday, January 19, 1997.)

On Art

Devorah L. Knaff

Clay play: Shapes from beginning of time

A ceramist sure of her vision revels in the coarseness of such a basic material and exults in its lowliness. 

Some artists in clay try to rise above the base origins of the form, disguising the fact that they are working with mud and earth by spinning out of those materials fantastically frail creations of porcelain, delicate fluted forms that seem to be made from air and ether rather than earth and water.

There is nothing wrong with this, for there is no actual deceit involve. We all know that these artists have worked a feat as magical and impossible as the alchemical transference of base metal to gold, for they allow us to see both baseness and gilt at the same time.

Other ceramic artists take the opposite approach, reveling in the coarseness of their material, exulting in its lowliness. They bring forth squat forms smeared thickly with coagulated glaze, shapes from the beginning of time that acknowledge the force of gravity and deny any longing toward the heavens.

Heo Jeong Hee, an artist-in-residence at La Sierra University, has chosen this latter path, which is no more virtuous than the other and is equally reliant on the skills of the artist.

Heo is indeed skilled, blending a passion for beauty with allegory, myth and an appreciation for the limitations and potential of clay.

Born in Seoul, Heo has established herself as an artist in her home country during the last decade, and her work has the practiced look of someone sure of her vision, indeed sufficiently sure to allow herself latitude to play.

Her work often has the magical simplicity of a child's creation -- the goal toward which Pablo Picasso said he spent his whole life tending. For example, "Earth Seed" is a nearly circular form balanced on a triangular shape, the stoneware glazed white on the outside with a brownish, planetary "seed" inside.

The piece suggests the earth being born amid the fires of the universe's origins as well as the fully formed planet floating in the silent light of the galaxy's stars. It is an image of comfort, of a seed being nurtured and solaced, and at the same time one of loneliness, of the tyranny of space and separation.

"Cimmerian Gate", a rectangular piece in which a copper plane surrounds a speckled gray door-shaped patch, is equally ambiguous. The piece takes its name from a people called the Cimmerii, who were reputed in classical times to live in perpetual darkness on the near side of Hades and on the far side of Oceanus, a river that circumnavigated Earth and was the origin of all things.

But the Cimmerii were also a real people, a Crimean tribe who overran Asia Minor in the seventh century. So which reference is Heo making? To the people shut up in eternal twilight or to a fiercely successful military group? And if it is to the former, why should we -- simply because we are inhabitants of a world of both light and darkness -- assume they are not happy in their realm, as content as the great fish of the depths or bats in their caves?

While one is tempted to see the tightly shut get of the piece as a door behind which the Cimmerii stand as penitents, yearning for light, perhaps inside they have sealed up this aperture themselves, keeping themselves pure from contamination by our world of shifting shadow.

Heo's "Beggar's Bowl" is equally puzzling because it seems to belong to anyone but a beggar. While the piece is the same thick, rather crudely shaped stoneware as are the other pieces in the exhibit and so clearly distinguished from the fine, thin porcelain of most finely set tables, it is also beautiful.

Heo has dripped the blue of peacock's breasts and the white of clouds wrapped around snowy mountains and the silver of molten ore and the purple of Phoenician snails across this platter so that the whole piece has become a jewel, a geode more fantastic than any that actually exists.

Beggars may thane to ask us for the food that guarantees human existence, Heo seems to say to us, but they enjoy free the beauty of the Earth.

"Work by Heo Jeong Hee" runs through Feb.8 at the Brandstater Gallery, La Sierra University, 4700 Pierce St., Riverside. Gallery hours are Mondays through Thursdays 10 a.m. to noon and 1:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturdays 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. For further information, call (909) 785-2959.

Devorah Knaff's column on the art scene in Southern California USA appears Sunday in The Press-Enterprise.

text from La Sierra university 'UPDATE' Summer-Fall 1996 (Page 7)

'UPDATE', A publication for prospective students of La Sierra University, Riverside, USA

By Alex Zuccarelli

This summer Jeong Hee Heo, a guest artist from Korea, is visiting La Sierra University's campus. Heo is a graduate from Sookmyung Women's University in Korea where she has become a highly-respected and influential artist in the field of ceramic craft design and sculpture. 

Heo earned her Master of Arts degree at sookmyung University and currently works out of her own private art studio in Seoul, Korea.

She has contributed to several major art exhibits and has had her work displayed at Korea's Museum of Modern Art. 

Through her work in her homeland, Heo has established a reputation as a unique and important emerging artist.

Heo's current work is designed in an abstract style that envelopes itself in mystique and raw feeling.

Though to some, Heo's sculptures, interlaced with rugged mountainous themes, may seem simple, she explains that there is something much deeper to her work than what the eye sees. 

There is almost a spiritual essence to her creations that invokes the art lover into a state of inward reflection.

Heo is truly living the basic goal of many artists: to take abstract feeling, emotion, insight, and revelation and convert these enigmatic jewels of the human soul into physical representations that can be seen and contemplated.

Through the summer, Heo will be working in the art department on a regular basis. Art students and enthusiasts are encouraged to come by the visual arts building, located at the upper end of LSU's campus, and talk with her or simply observe her as she forms her creation. The climax of Heo's visit is Brandstater Gallery's art show in which her work will be exhibited. A specific date has not yet been agreed upon, but those who are interested should contact the art department during the 1996-97 school year for further details.