Yoona Hur is a Seoul-born, New York–based artist whose practice explores cultural identity, spirituality, and materiality through ceramics and painting. Drawing from Korean traditional arts, nature and meditation, her practice evokes contemplative spaces between presence and absence, stillness and transformation.

Reimagined Moon Jars (dalhangari), which anchor Hur’s ceramic practice, embody Buddhist teachings in which emptying oneself is simultaneously an act of release and transformation. Balance emerges through this process of becoming, held within the vessels’ inherent openness.

Alongside these forms, she creates sculptural birds informed by research into ancient ceramics, memory, and landscape, all united through the material language of clay. Birds serve as liminal figures, moving between earthly and divine realms, the temporal and the eternal. Their gestural, petal-like wings evoke flight, aspiration, and longing, while cave-like voids suggest spaces of refuge, rest, and dwelling.

Her works on canvas, composed of Korean mulberry paper (hanji), similarly explore the interplay between emptiness and material presence. Through layered surfaces and embodied mark-making, they inscribe the spirit of the land and the memory of the hand.

Represented by Francis Gallery (LA), Amelie du Chalard (NY & Paris), Onna House (NY) and HGFA (CT), her work is widely exhibited and collected across North America, Europe, and Asia. Her work has been featured in Rizzoli, Wall Street Journal Magazine, NY Times - T magazine, AW Architectur & Wohnen- Germany, Architectural Digest-Italia, The Architect’s Newspaper, Dezeen, Masion Kora, and Cultured Magazine.

Graduate of The Cooper Union [Bachelor of Architecture ‘10] and The School of Art Institute of Chicago [Bachelor of Fine Arts ‘06], she worked as an architect in New York City at Matthew Baird Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Agrest and Gandelsonas Architects.

She has been a guest lecturer and critic at The Cooper Union, SCAD and The School of Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently teaching ceramics at The Cooper Union, School of Architecture.