Seoul Korean Art Week is in full swing, and one of the best shows to watch during it is the recently opened Moon Shin retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Deoksugung Branch of Korea.
Marking the centenary of Moon’s birth, this retrospective definitively charts the unclassifiable work of an artist who “taken a challenge in the New World in the midst of turbulent times in Korea,” wrote Hong Nam-pyo, Mayor of Changwon City. In the introduction to the exhibition catalog. (Changwon City, where there is a museum dedicated to the moon, is a co-organizer of the retrospective exhibition, and that institution has made a number of loans for the exhibition.)
Simply put, the show is amazing. It is a testament to the true strength of the artist who was Moon.
The show, titled Towards the Universe, spans across four distinct galleries and features one of the best installation designs I’ve ever encountered. Each gallery has its own character, from the curved brown walls of the paintings to the large stone panels to display the sculptures. A custom audio clip is inserted intended to accompany the mood of the room. In one area, for example, the gorgeous jazz compliments the lush blue carpet nicely.
Born in 1922 in Kyushu, Japan, to a Korean father and Japanese mother, Moon came to Korea when he was five years old. She was brought up by his paternal grandmother. At the age of 16, he returned to Japan to study painting and then returned to Korea in 1945, after the country was liberated from Japanese colonial rule. Having established a painting center, Moon traveled between Seoul and his hometown of Massan, until he moved again, at the age of forty, to Paris, where he spent the next twenty years. He returned permanently to Seoul in 1980.
Although he began his practice in painting, Moon eventually branched out into sculpture, craft, design, and architecture. “He also crossed different dichotomous boundaries between East and West, traditional and modern, figurative and abstract, organic and geometric, passion and modeling, form and content, original and reproduction, material and spiritual, to find the ultimately wonderful balance between two opposing terms,” curator Park Haesung wrote in the catalog. .
Moon achieved fame both domestically and internationally throughout his life; He died in 1995. But his work now remains unknown, in part, Park wrote, because he was “a potential wanderer” and “a divergent figure in the history of modern Korean art.” Moon was at the height of his career around the time of the post-war Dansaekhwa movement, which appreciated the flatness of monochrome. But his art is certainly unlike anything that movement has ever produced.
Here’s a look at nine works Moon must know, whose retrospective run at the MMCA Deoksugung runs through January 29, 2023.
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