Seoul’s Korea Art Week is in full swing, and one of the best shows to see during it is a recently opened Moon Shin retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea’s Deoksugung branch.
Marking the centennial of Moon’s birth, this retrospective incisively charts the uncategorizable work of an artist “who took up a challenge in the new world in the midst of tumultuous times in Korea,” as Hong Nam-Pyo, the Mayor of Changwon City, writes in a foreword the exhibition catalogue. (Changwon City, where a museum devoted to Moon is located, is a co-organizer of the retrospective, and that institution made a number of loans to this show.)
Put simply, the show is a stunner. It’s a testament to the true tour de force of an artist that Moon was.
Spread across four distinct galleries, the show, titled “Towards the Universe,” has one of the best installation designs I’ve ever encountered. Each gallery has its own feel, from curving brown walls for the paintings to large stone slabs to display the sculptures. A custom soundtrack meant to accompany the mood of the room is piped in. In one area, for example, cool jazz nicely complements lush blue carpeting.
Born in 1922 in Kyushu, Japan, to a Korean father and Japanese mother, Moon came to Korea when he was five years old; he was raised by his paternal grandmother. At 16, he returned to Japan to study painting and then moved back to Korea in 1945, following the country’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule. Having established a painting practice, Moon travelled between Seoul and his hometown of Masan, until he moved again, at age 40, to Paris, where he spent the next 20 years. He permanently returned to Seoul in 1980.
Though he began his practice with painting, Moon eventually branched out to sculpture, craft, design, and architecture. “He also transversed various dichotomous borders between the East and the West, traditional and modern, figurative and abstract, organic and geometric, craving and modelling, form and content, original and reproduction, material and spiritual, eventually to find the exquisite balance between the two opposing terms,” exhibition curator Park Hyesung writes in the catalogue.
Moon achieved fame both locally and internationally throughout his life; he died in 1995. But his work now remains little known, in part, Park writes, because he “was a potential wanderer” and a “disparate figure in the history of Korean modern art.” Moon was at the height of his career around the time of the postwar Dansaekhwa movement, which prized the flatness of the monochrome. But his art is decidedly different from anything that movement ever produced.
Below is a look at nine works to know by Moon, whose retrospective at the MMCA Deoksugung runs through January 29, 2023.
“What is necessary at the centennial of the artist’s birth is not to repeat the myth of the artist but to write a new story,” Park writes. That’s the animating impetus behind this exhibition, which begins with the only surviving work from Moon’s student days in Japan. As with other works he went on to make, Self-portrait was created in direct opposition to the reigning style of Tokyo at the time: a surrealist-inflected mode that was popular with the avant-garde. Crafted with thick layers of paint, this self-portrait was made the year after Moon’s work was rejected from the important Nikaten annual exhibition in Japan. His direct stare connotes his status as an artist who will not be deterred.
Moon’s application of thick paint is masterful and unequalled by many artists, and that means it’s impossible for a photograph to entirely do Fishing justice. The anguish seen in the men’s faces as they collectively try to reel in a fish is heightened by the intensity of Moon’s carved frame. It’s an early indication that Moon was always destined to become a sculptor.
During the early period of his five-decade career, Moon focused on creating images that were not “distant from reality” but based on “actual experience of real life,” as he once said. The chaos of the cooped-up chickens depicted here is juxtaposed with the calm of a farmer trying to stay cool in the blazing sun. Chicken Coop is one of several works in this show that have never before been shown publicly. It’s a recent acquisition by the MMCA that came via the estate of the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee, which included thousands of artworks that were divided among South Korea’s national museums.
During the ’60s and ’70s, Moon embarked on a more experimental period. The figures faded into abstract shapes that were made from a mixture of oil paints, various fabrics, and other materials that are delicately affixed to the canvas. Seen from some angles, these forms appear flat; looked at from other vantage points, they seem to bulge outward. Once again, the painting’s rough texture is foregrounded by Moon.
Starting in the late ’60s while he was in Paris, Moon began to branch out from painting into sculpture, the medium he is now best known for. These works were shown widely and were often laboriously hand-crafted in a range of mediums: wood, bronze, stone, and stainless steel. Moon saved his most enduring love for wood, crafting works from oak, cherry, walnut, ebony, mahogany, and yew, which he then polished until the object’s surface was so smooth that it gleaned. He made these works in a variety of sizes and shapes, though these wood pieces most commonly take the form of two shapes that seem cosmically bonded together. The pieces often resemble organs crafted from the earth, like a pair of lungs, kidneys, or even testicles.
When he began working in bronze, Moon came to rely on organic shapes and symmetry. At the MMCA Deoksugung, the installation of this body of late-career work is particularly elegant. This piece can be seen there on a plinth that rests above a small square of sand from a rock garden. As Park writes in the catalogue, Becoming One “stands proudly like the tree of life that connects heaven and earth.”
Moon was a prolific draughtsman, creating numerous drawings that allowed him to work through his ideas before translating them to sculpture. Because of this, by the time he actually began to work, he would let his materials guide him. (A fall from a ladder in 1973 would leave him bedridden for four months, and can partially account for his turn to draw.) In these coloured drawings, made with variously coloured Chinese inks, Moon’s figures pulse and radiate in kaleidoscopic compositions.
Moon first came to international acclaim with the installation of The Man of the Sun (1969–70), which was shown as part of an outdoor sculpture show in southern France. Some 18 years later, Moon revisited the twisting curves of that work for his commission for the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul. These two towers of stainless steel soared over 82 feet high when they went on view. On view here is a preparatory drawing and proposal for the work, as well as a 1/30 scale model that allows viewers to gaze upon this sculpture like never before.
In the final years of his career, Moon began to think through how his works could live in the public realm, outside museums and galleries. Many of those works were never realized, though they can be experienced in this exhibition as part of a VR feature that allows visitors to get up close and personal. This work, which has been 3-D printed from a drawing by Moon, shows the artist at his most playful and ambitious. It proposes a park in which various types of his sculpture meld and coalescence in a setting meant for experiencing pure beauty.
Source: ARTnews
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