A Note on Hubert

I cannot clearly remember when I first met Hubert. During the residency, we once talked about when exactly it had been, and I think it was when I was preparing my Master graduation show at the Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. Hubert came from Paris to help my classmate Alexis. I had already heard his name multiple times through friends from the fine arts school of Cergy, but that was the first time we actually met. I think it must have been sometime around 2018.

After graduating from Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, I came back to Korea to apply for a working holiday visa, hoping it would allow me to stay in Europe as long as possible. I’m not sure if that was the first year Hubert came to Korea, but I heard he needed various props and clothes for a Leaf Magazine shoot. I asked my sister, who was a fashion editor at the time, if she could lend some clothes. That was how I first worked as an assistant on one of Hubert’s projects.

Whenever Hubert introduced himself, he had a signature introduction. I can’t remember the full wording, but it always began like this: “I’m a fashion photographer, though sometimes I introduce myself as an image maker rather than simply a photographer.” Looking back at the photos from the Leaf Magazine shoot, they were clearly for a fashion magazine, yet they also felt like an art project. He wanted to create an image of clothes floating from helium balloons on Namsan, so I had to find the lightest clothes possible and large balloons. When I think about the result, I couldn’t say for sure whether it was fashion photography or art photography, but one thing was certain: the image was good.

Hubert started working on his independent publication, ‘L’idiot utile’, in 2019, and it was through this project that his work became much clearer to me. I returned to Korea in 2020 after nearly ten years of living in Europe, just as COVID began to spread. The following year, Hubert could not come to Korea because of the pandemic. When L’idiot utile was finally published in 2022, seeing several photographic series in one edition—works that sat somewhere between fashion and art—the way he introduced himself began to make more sense. When he came back to Korea that year for Unlimited Edition 14, I was reminded again of his signature introduction. Spending time behind his booth that day, I found myself thinking that his self-introduction suited him well.

After that, we met once or twice a year for meals with the same group of friends. One November, we even had an early Christmas party because Hubert wanted one. But when he returned in 2024, I was not in a good state at all. It was my third year at the company, and since I was no longer making art, I felt I had nothing to talk about. Even though I turned down his messages several times, he kept telling me we had to meet. When I finally found the courage to see him, he still remembered the person I had been before. The conversation we had that day stayed with me for a long time.

After leaving my job in early 2025, I finally had the chance to go back to Europe that September. I asked Hubert if we could meet in Paris, but he told me he would be in Korea while I was in Europe. I was planning to be away for two months, from early September to the end of October, so I told him he could stay at my place. Hubert said he would be in Korea for one more month, until November, and would look for a different place afterward.

It was difficult for me to casually suggest that we live together in November. Even though we had seen each other every year, we had never traveled together or spent more than a day together. Still, I began to think it might be good to restart my earlier residency project with him. Seeing it in terms of an “invited artist and an assistant” made the idea much easier to imagine.

DANBI HUR, 2026’