1. is a word I picked up while working with building materials technicians and recording their language.

In simple terms, it refers to a dislocation or protrusion that occurs in machining operations, but in the field, it also refers to various wrong edges that are accidentally created by workers when they work with various materials.

Improvisational gestures of the workers come from trial and error and problem-solving in the course of your work, and they happen in many different ways, and whether and how they remove "burr" depends on their mood, their work environment, and even the weather.

I don’t take the 'burr' as a mistake or defect in the working process, but rather as a medium that encompasses everything in each workgroup and illogically connects it to something else.... In my own words, it is an unwanted piece of material, an inevitable surplus, an unresolved part of itself, but that is what makes it unique and lovely...

2. I thought about how everything has a social beginning... Every material has its own temperature, with its own physical properties, and it has a specific use and a specific way of being used. When you use a material in the wrong way, you're disrupting the expectations of how it should behave as a material, which is also a kind of social betrayal. I exploit the liminality of materials by treating them with the idea of insulting their materiality... with the idea that i am slightly giving a shit the materiality... I try to make sculpture in a different way by treating materials lightly, by accidentally solving problems, by the freedom to delete and change, and by using unconventional methods.

3. The sensations of the skin that are associated with physical forces such as touch, vibration, and pressure that occur at the interface of the body's interior and exterior are the sensations of exhibition. One day, I noticed that liquid materials for waterproofing, coating, insulation, and finishing could become tacky or sticky, crunchy or hardened, depending on temperature or humidity. They wakened different emotions not only with sence of touch but also smell, interestingly, when the materials themselves hardened and combined with other substances, they made the stink of the body, not the stink of the building. Pieces of diseased skin from various acts of labor and craving, with wounds, sores, blisters, sebum, boils, crusts, bumps, wrinkles, hives, hair, scabs, pus, blood, etc., are sewn, carved, densely embedded, stuck, secretly attached, or barely adhered to the body.

4. Living in Germany, I had to change my working/living language for a long time. As a foreigner, the use of foreign languages is very limited, especially as an art student, a young foreign woman, and an Asian woman, but I now feel more free to use them than when I was local. After returning home, I switched my language back to Korean and started teaching German, especially since these two languages have become my materials of work for a living.

4.1. The sentence 'kiss my ass' is used as a flattery or an insult. These words, phrases, or sentences have more than one meaning. I've always enjoyed the way these words, sentences, or phrases can have more than one meaning, and one of them is considered a 'burr'. As you can see from the use of the sentence, the perception of the ass is based on the interpretation of the ass as both sexualized and repulsive body parts.... The body parts are imagined by adjectives (too small, medium, too large) and performed by verbs (go, come, drag...make).

5. I think about female excretion, which is not particularly talked about anywhere. It is an idea about the mysterious ambivalence of female excretion within the social order, but on the other hand, there is 'male fecal comedy', which has become a typical subject of comedy and causes weird laughter. In this exhibition, I connect 'burr' with 'female excretion and covered 'architecture' with 'burr' based on my ambivalence towards architecture. Also by stealing the methods and practices of 'poop comedy' that have been the preserve of men, i intend to frustrate both architecture and 'male poop comedy' at the same time.

 

Using “labor” and “craving” as keywords for her work and a method to understand herself and others, Hyelim Hong works principally on three-dimensional and installation pieces using architecturalmaterials as her primary media. Based on her wide experience with different media and collaboration with architectural engineers, Hong has gradually moved from the collection of domestic objects and images to the intermediate subjects between family members and materials to the bodyas a material itself. More recently, she has worked with the concept of “burr”, which refers to the surplus materials, tools, and unused debris found at the construction site, focusing on tactile senseto interpret labor as the various expressions and results of craving, rather than as a plain act of reproduction.​