¤ýÀÛ¼ºÀÏ 2017/01/23 (¿ù) 18:00
¤ýºÐ ·ù °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð
¤ýÁ¶È¸: 2584  
The Place of Existence for Creation

The Place of Existence for Creation



Sunyoung Lee (art critic)



It is a fundamental narrative of the modern era that universal division of labor increased both productivity and isolation of humans. Some proposed an alternative in the form of revolution or reform, but the dualistic nature of progress or development is an ongoing paradox that is still affecting us. The only way to overcome the fragmented reality as a result of extreme division of labor in our daily lives is through leisure. However, consumption to fill one¡¯s leisure supports isolated labor. Can art propose an alternative to this vicious cycle, or to those who are dismissed even by the vicious cycle? Unlike divided labor, art is a holistic activity that requires not only one¡¯s imagination but also the dream, subconscious, and every drop of sweat. Although art can be a pain to some, it can also be a source of joy to others. Art as a holistic activity causes ¡®Finding Flow,¡¯ which was a theme for the recent solo exhibition of Moon, Sooman in Daegu.

After spending his 30s as a successful venture entrepreneur, he became an artist in his 40s, and, for that reason, he must have stronger faith in art and rely on it more than anyone else. However, the Korean art scene does not share his vision, although he seems likely to continue his work regardless of such ¡®objective¡¯ vision. The art scene, in which multiple biennales are held each year, only reflects fragmented works in a fragmented way and, as a result, fail to convey the messages of art as a whole. The pictures of artworks printed on monthly magazines do not reveal the essence of the artworks and there are only limited explanations. They are simply filled with unfinished paintings and articles. Products that were created within their own fields cannot be fully enjoyed. And such fragmentalism continues, probably because of the power behind it. Unfortunately, it is reckless for artists to pour everything into their works as it is becoming more and more obvious that power is what you need in order to make mediocre works stand out. Everywhere you go, they only talk about money and connection.

If, in a fashion show, you see only grotesque clothes that nobody would be able to understand, you will need to question the power that enables these clothes to be put on the stage, even if nobody will buy or wear them, rather than simply blaming the incomprehensible nature of fashion. Thanks to those who arbitrarily display biased information, art is becoming more and more exclusive. Moon, Sooman¡¯s works, regardless of their scales, show highly concentrated density and strength in style, and it seems to be part of the artist¡¯s strategy as someone who is far from the power that supports absurdity. Each of his round paintings is complete on their own, and this enables his works to travel around the world without any ¡®hidden¡¯ power behind them or even the artist himself. His upcoming solo exhibition ¡®Ô¶ÍïªÎìÏ(Poter¡¯s wing)¡¯, which is to be held at Gallery Kitanozaka (ÝÁå¯÷ø) in Kobe, Japan, in October, shows his works in which different elements were placed according to his own rules.

With delicate elements such as flowers, butterfly, and even void and cracks placed by using exterior materials that are generally applied to ships, his paintings are paradoxical in that, to open them, you need to close them. Only the perfect can be ¡®together.¡¯ Different pieces of his paintings share a similar image according to the series, as if they were cut off the same stem. While a stem is diachronic, a section is synchronic. A section in a stem satisfies both self-sufficiency and continuity. They have the past and the future and also enjoys the fulfilled present. They exist and disappear at the same time. This method enables containing the whole in parts, rather than leaving the parts as separate entities. The audience can restructure continuity from such discontinuity. In one painting, you see a flower fully blossoming, in another, you just see a butterfly, and, in others, you see just void and cracks. The plate-like round canvas contains a void.

The round frame serves as a symbol suitable for conveying the sense of nothingness or infinity. It maximizes the nature of art, revealing infinity with finiteness. In the [Ô¶Íï, the poter] series, the artist shows changes in stains or brightness, for the audience who may resist (or fear) blank. [Filing empty-2], which reveals a celadon void filled with cracks, reminds us of some divine act to create various shapes of topography by flicking a surface. [ðàúÅ, make a perfume] series and [Øæ, vein], for which Moon won an award in Japan, shows the flow of force such as with fragrance and sound that dissipates from the center. When these energies become materialized, they would turn into a mountain or valley, just like in his paintings. All solid things such as mountains and valleys must have been a type of energy at one time. It is also a network of energy, like the pulse of butterfly, that is omnipresent in his other series. In Moon¡¯s paintings, such pulse is sometimes realized in fine forms like cracks. 

Fine cracks, which are affected by temperature and pressure, imply disconnection of what was once connected. The thick pulses seem disconnected in his paintings but are connected underneath. The [Finding Flow] series is comparable to mandala, as it arranges flowers on the celadon background and sometimes fill the space between the center and outer edge of the paintings with complex patterns, through which the viewers get lost and gain enlightenment. The round canvas is still but conveys movement. However, the center is as quiet as the hub of a wheel. Sometimes, like in [ðàúÅ-04], a tornado is lying beneath the paintings, producing and absorbing everything. The center plays an important role in his paintings that are small yet infinite. Jean Salem, in his book Ancient Atomism, introduces the philosopher Epicurus who viewed the space as being infinite. His these that ¡®there is an infinite number of worlds¡¯ also applies to Moon¡¯s works at the center of which lies potential movement.

According to the ancient atomism, when the cosmos was created, tornadoes of different kinds of atoms fell out of it. Atomists believed that the cosmos consists of atoms and void. The number of atoms and size of void are also infinite. To them, the cosmos is ¡®overall infinite and the subsets of it, i.e., atoms and void, are also infinite¡¯(Lucretius). In such infinite cosmos, atoms make up the world by various combinations and arrangements. The [Finding Flow] series, which contains plant shapes, show potential movements like spokes. In a painting of the [Ô¶ÍïªÎìÏ] series, plants are arranged like spokes. The center of a wheel does not move. This center is something that ¡®moves while not moving¡¯ (Aristotle). In this context, the butterfly, which is at the center of the [Ô¶ÍïªÎìÏ] series is not fixed. It is a center of the movement for ¡®eternal return (Nietzsche)¡¯ along the circumference, and this center changes gradually through repetition and difference.

Butterflies must coevolve with humans, reacting subtly to the ecosystem. The [Ô¶ÍïªÎìÏ] series features atavistic butterflies, which are a trademark of Moon. From the early days as an artist, he has used butterflies as an icon that shows diversity of the nature. The butterflies in his paintings maintain a consistent form and, thereby, maximize small differences. It is a way of maximizing diversity through one. When you see the butterflies, each of them placed on a single canvas, it is like the butterflies change the pattern with each flap of their wings. And this movement perhaps changes the time and space to which they belong. The flapping wings cause a subtle wavelength and sends the ¡®butterfly effect¡¯ to a time and place that is far away. The strong pulse and fine cracks shown in other paintings of his are visual representation of such wavelength. The artist simulates diversity of the nature. Although there are pictures of butterflies above his worktable on which various tools including a magnifying glass are placed, he no longer looks at butterflies or the pictures of them when painting.

The paintings of Moon Suman are precise but not representative. Representation cannot convey such diversity and amusement shown in his paintings. The fine downy hair you can observe through a magnifying glass gives a strange effect, but it is the butterflies¡¯ wings that are at the center of the diverse look. Instead of being fixated on a particular image of butterflies, he imitates the process through which a butterfly is born and goes through metamorphosis. The brush strokes create certain waves, and, when the fine details are added, the pattern of the butterfly is crystallized. This means, coincidence plays a role in the process of painting a butterfly and a background for it. In Moon¡¯s paintings, butterflies are more like fantasy. And that is why they are so clear. As a referent, butterflies are a key to entering into the fantasy world. The white background often found in his early works, which reminds us of collection boxes, transformed into pottery with cracks or corroded bronze. The surfaces with fine cracks or corrosion give the artificial background a natural feel. 

What does not change is the shape that represents the characteristics of a butterfly and presence of a shadow, which gives the illusion that the butterfly is real. The symbol of beauty and diversity that used to bed confined in a white rectangle now settled on the color and shape of infinity. However,. Butterflies, which the artist can now paint without reference, are his alter ego that takes the central place in his paintings, representing finiteness within infinity. The colors and patterns of butterflies are also infinite. The artist shows infinity within infinity. The small size does not weaken the infinity. Moon¡¯s works maintain consistent strength and density regardless of the size. All of the round canvases in this exhibition have a symbolic effect on their own, unlike neutral, rectangular canvases. His paintings have a sound within silence, like movement within stillness. Both the square canvases in his early days and the more recent round ones are perhaps like the CD he once made for ¡®fun¡¯ as a music aficionado.

His handmade CD, which you can imagine seeing in a record store, is a product of simulation without reference, just like his paintings. Both the round and square canvases were used only for unique cases as an icon, rather as a general frame, throughout the history of art. Music discs turn time into space and material while providing mesmerizing experience to music lovers. Round and square frames have symmetrical stability and represent perfection. In the history of art or alchemy, we often see circles encasing a square or symbols representing a perfect human being. Our desire for perfection may be attributed to various sources, such as religion and technology, but, fundamentally, it is related to aesthetic experience. Even dictators were immersed in such aesthetic experience. It provokes the desire for material possession and, that is why, CDs are still available even when digital music became the norm.

In Moon¡¯s paintings, the round disks and square frames that contain the disks symbolize the perfect time and space that spurs qualitative leap of the time and space that is otherwise meaningless. The images on a circle or square create unique synesthetic experience based on image and music. The round frame is a multi-layered symbol of the sky, spirit, and ego. While the butterfly is the artist¡¯s alter ego, it represents another ego within his ego. It pursues perfection, like idea. Siobhan Roberts suggested, in the book [King of Infinite Space], which centers around the life of a geometrician, Plato is the successor of Pythagoras who believed that all things are generated from numbers. Plato, who said ¡®God always applies the principles of geometry,¡¯ noted circle, sphere, square, and cube as ideal geometrical forms. They were believed to exist on a higher level of the world, apart from the physical reality.

The circle and square frames in Moon¡¯s paintings represent logical rigor and absolute purity. The butterflies combine imitation and original idea, and the images carved on the ceramic or bronze ware and the round frame surrounding them are all symbolic. Ernst Cassirer, in [Concept symbol format in the structure of the humanities], suggested we are not surrounded by the nature, but, rather, that we are living in the cultural world constructed by our perception and this cultural world is a system of various symbolic forms consisting of certain rules of creation. When we view Moon¡¯s paintings based on the concept of symbols defined by Cassirer, sensual objects, including both the nature (butterfly, sky) and the artificial (ceramic ware, bronze ware) obtain spiritual and universal nature and the spiritual advances toward the sensual world through symbols. It is the symbols that bridge the nature, which has been destroyed in the modern era, and art. In Moon¡¯s paintings, technology is also included in this bridge.

However, regardless of his past history, Moon is now a painter who paints with oil or acrylic paints on a canvas. Artists deal with infinity in different ways than philosophers or scientists do. The philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, in their book ¡®What is Philosophy?,¡¯ argued art is also reasoning process like philosophy and science, but through emotion and perception. According to them, between science and philosophy and art are networks woven with infinite correspondences. Each concept is at the center of vibration, in their relationship to other concepts. For that reason, the whole resonates, rather than occurring in a series or being consistent with one another, just like Moon who attempts to create resonance through visible/invisible pulses and the cracks he makes on the canvas surface. Deleuze and Guattari viewed the uniqueness of art lies in restoring infinity through finiteness. Art has different methods than philosophy or science. According to these philosophers, philosophy attempts to save infinity by applying consistency to infinity. And science, by contrast, gives up on infinity in order to obtain instructional relationships.

However, art attempts to create finiteness that restores infinity. In Moon¡¯s paintings, we find the ¡®composition that returns infinity¡¯ conceptualize by Deleuze and Guattari, as shown in the surface of the round canvas and butterfly and the relationship network of various patterns that are arranged in strange ways. In his paintings, space is dense with different patterns and subtle stains, but the void (negative space) is essential. It places distance from the possibility of turning the artwork into a finite formal system under the name of perfection. Here, movement takes place not only between visually similar frames and icons, but also between multi-layered symbols. The symbols are not fixed but fluid and resonant. And it is typified by the concept and shape of ¡®pulse.¡¯ The pulse unfolds on the ego and the sky, that is, the round canvas. Here, the clear symbol is the idea of correspondence between the microcosm and macrocosm.

Correspondence is not a chaos of categories but an alternative reasoning of humans who became distant from the nature. At this time when the position of humans became more unsettled than ever, we need to look toward the analogical reasoning. It is also often found in mythology and in Eastern philosophy. In Moon¡¯s paintings, correspondence unfolds through reasoning on infinity. Quoting Cusanus, Cassirer sets two forms of relative infinity that opposes the god, in ¡®The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy.¡¯ One is revealed through the cosmos and the other in human mind. In the former, infinity is realized by the fact that the space expands endlessly without spacial limits. Moon¡¯s round canvases in which actual or potential concentric circles are found show correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm like in The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy.

According to this book, during Renaissance, humans were thought to both surround and be surrounded by the cosmos and ego by the world. In a time of incomplete fragments, holistic thinking is necessary more than anything else. Science and technology that improves productivity through extreme division of labor, which is the most predominant means of domination, diminishes humans. They are irrelevant to humanism, in both positive and negative ways. To be sure, the hierarchical cosmos of Renaissance is only possible on a symbolic level in this time, after the scientific revolution. And the symbolic cosmos emphasizes creation as much as existence. According to The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, there are two distinctive narrative means, i.e., one for the field of existence and the other for creation. According to Cassirer, strict knowledge exists only in relation to the permanent, i.e., things that are always identical to themselves and eternally consistent.

On the other hand, the things that are limited in time and change in different moments cannot be grasped by knowledge. Moon¡¯s paintings, which leave a large negative space to accept changes, promote not only a place of existence but also creation. The round canvas contains blue sky and changeable reality. Jean Salem, in Acient Atomism, introduced atomists who argued movement would be impossible if everything is full. According to him, atomists believed, without void, there is no movement and that the void is the cause of movement. Here, creation does not mean making something out of nothing but forming something from debris of the previous world. The simulation of particles that are created and disappear in Moon¡¯s paintings emphasizes creation. And the simulated creation is in contrast to representation and production. His works take the Korean or Eastern background and form, but are at the meeting point between Eastern and Western philosophy in that they surround the ego with the nature.

 

   
31 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 2024 ÀϺ» ¹®¼ö¸¸°³ÀÎÀü Àü½Ã¸®ºä 2024/03/02 (Åä) 02:07 83
30 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð Moon Sooman¡¯s Paintings - The Universe, Nature and Being De.. 2023/10/28 (Åä) 01:45 208
29 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð ¹®¼ö¸¸ÀÇ È¸È­ - ½Ò¾Ë¿¡¼­ ÆÄ»ýµÈ ¿ìÁÖ, ÀÚ¿¬, Á¸Àç 2023/10/28 (Åä) 01:41 95
28 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð ¹®¼ö¸¸ - ÁýÀûµÈ ½Ò¾Ë_»çÄ«¿ì¿¡ ¿ä½ÃŸ·Î(÷øß¾ëù÷¼郎) 2023/03/14 (È­) 04:12 433
27 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð ÙþÙ¥ªòõ骭߾ª²ªÆª­ª¿ÍÚØ£¡¢絵ªÎñéªËí©ªµªë-«¤・«½«ó.. 2022/12/03 (Åä) 00:04 446
26 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 2022 ¡¤ Connecting the Dots : ¹®¼ö¸¸ ÃÊ´ëÀü Æò·Ð [Ãà¾àº»] 2022/11/07 (¿ù) 04:49 423
25 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 2022 Connecting the dots - English criticism 2022/11/07 (¿ù) 04:35 426
24 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 2022 ¶¼¾ÆÆ®°¶·¯¸® ¹®¼ö¸¸ÃÊ´ëÀü 2022/07/31 (ÀÏ) 09:35 616
23 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 31ȸ °³ÀÎÀü Æò·Ð - ¸ôÀÔÀ» ÅëÇÑ ÀÚÀ¯ ÀÇÁöÀÇ Ç¥Ãâ 2021/07/31 (Åä) 14:30 1394
22 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð Á¦19ȸ_Àü½ÃÆò·Ð_»çÄ«¿ì¿¡ ¿ä½ÃŸ·Î 2019/03/04 (¿ù) 23:53 2331
21 ±âŸ°ü·Ã±Û 18ȸ °³ÀÎÀü µµ·Ï 2018/12/22 (Åä) 00:46 2152
20 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 2009~2018 °³ÀÎÀü Æò·Ð¸ðÀ½ 2018/07/17 (È­) 04:33 2402
19 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð Á¦16ȸ °³ÀÎÀü Æò·Ð(±¹¹®+¿µ¹®) 2018/08/14 (È­) 06:49 2690
18 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 15ȸ ÀϺ»°³ÀÎÀü_ÀÌŸ¹Ì½Ã¸³°üÀå Æò·Ð 2018/06/02 (Åä) 17:05 2041
17 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 15ȸ ÀϺ»°³ÀÎÀü 2018/06/02 (Åä) 17:01 2067
16 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 14th Sooman Moon Solo Exhibition 2017/12/22 (±Ý) 11:35 2393
15 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 14ȸ½Ã°£Àǹ®-¹®¼ö¸¸Àü Æò·Ð 2017/12/12 (È­) 07:00 2422
14 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 13th Solo Exhibition - Morris Gallery 2017/03/16 (¸ñ) 01:24 2562
13 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð 13ȸ ¸ð¸®½º°¶·¯¸® °³ÀÎÀü Æò·Ð 2017/03/16 (¸ñ) 01:22 2691
12 °³ÀÎÀüÆò·Ð ßæà÷ªÎª¿ªáªÎðíÎíÞᶠ2017/01/23 (¿ù) 18:11 2439
12