A Butterfly Flying from the Surface

Heo, Na-Yeong(Art Critism)

If going down there in mistaking it as a blue radish field,

her weak wings are picked in sea wave

and she returns with exhaution.

- In the <Sea and Butterfly> by Kim, Ki-Rim

A butterfly is Moon, Soo-Man’s avatar and the artist himself. As a substitute of metaphorical ego chosen for overcome his hardships, a butterfly appeared in his canvas. Like a butterfly having wings to fly even weak contrary to a flower not going out of the place where it deeply rooted, the artist wanted to freely fly. However, at first, he could not fly. Like a stuffed butterfly seen in a museum, even a pin in his butterfly was finely detailed and was fixed on the screen. However, one day, the artist picked out the pin. And he contained a flying butterfly as well as an open-winged butterfly in his work. He did so in the hope that the fly could fly a little. In spite of his trial, the butterfly was confined in the surface of picture. In spite of a circle frame to roll down without any hindrance, the butterfly was confined in the frame, like the artist who can’t leave far away in his weaken body.

Butterfly Settling On the Surface of Pottery

Moon Soo-Man tells “if a butterfly is like my body, then the space being used as the background is my soul.” The artist’s body, that is, the butterfly as the subject of picture gained the life through the detailed description. The wing’s detailed veins and showy colors filing the gap between veins, and shining and glossy fur and her antenna to elastically move! The butterfly drawn by Moon Soo-Man is the appearance of real butterfly, itself. However, as this being so, the picture is more unrealistic. What times of the experiences that we can seen such a detailed butterfly around us are. As doing so, the butterfly’s wings are more attractive and dazzling. However the butterfly is still confined in the screen.

If the butterfly does not go out of the surface of painting, then the problem will be solved by changing the space where the butterfly stays to other space. Like the wheel of eternal cycle of birth, death and rebirth turns, the surface of prototype was Korean traditional paper, then changed to a marble and eventually became to a celadon. As the surface of space became the surface of celadon, then its soul world became more specific, because it became the celadon itself, not a flat surface. Moon Soo-Man unfolded the 3D image of celadon in the flat surface. For this, the artist digitalized the celadon’s image and added patterns. So the center of circle surface became the mouth of celadon, and the border of circle became the heels of pottery. In the unfolded celadon, some inlaid patterns were carved. The patterns drawn in the opposite way from the real inlaid-carving technique are the patterns of cloud, crane and arabesque being carved in a real celadon, and the drawn patterns were so alike that we can’t almost distinguish them from those in a real celadon. Even the drawn pottery’s outline is similar to a real celadon’s unique, glimmering shape’s outline. So, like the Simulacre insisted by Jean Baudrillard, the artist created more real-like celadon surface than a real celadon’s surface. In the picture, the butterfly seems to be comfortable. Various kinds of butterflies boast their colorful patterns and are naturally harmonized with the drawn celadon. Like a piece of white-black painting. Moon Soo-Man used different way from others in order to create the celadon’s Simulacre. As it was a trail about materials by the artist, not-majoring a pottery, it was possible. He mastered the technique making the surface of screen as a that of pottery or that of Korean traditional paper. Clearly, a canvas is a common material being used in acrylic painting or oil painting, but it generated a new visual effect by adding a magical effect under a master’s touch similar to alchemist’s. And this is the visual effect, not that of celadon, itself.

Expansion to the Fractal World

The visual effect making the effect be looked like a celadon flows along the picture’s background space and then reaches at the boundary of screen. At observing some parts of a material and looking into all kinds of scientific tools, their fine textures approaches newly and strangely to us. To Moon Soo-Man, the heels of pottery was alike. To the artist, the pottery’s clotty, unfinished lump of rather seemed to go beyond the value of whole celadon. Like Toyotomi Hideyoshi who was fascinated with Choson’s common bowl.

The clotty plane of heels having occupied the screen’s round boundary swarmed to the center of screen. This is like an experience that the space-time is reversed with changing the external side into the internal side and converse. And while expressing the pottery’s bumping surface, the visual effect making the surface being felt like a metal was generated and the shape like a mountain range was created, too.

The artist considered a bump on the heel of pottery as a vein. And, further, he named the fractal to the bump. In fact, the both terms are not different meanings. The Nature seeming to be chaotic and disordered can be explained as the fractal’s principle that a small unit is repeated circularly. Like a way forming a leaf’s vein, a branch is put out of a tree’s trunk, and the way repeating small curves in a coastline creates a coastline’s curve seen from a satellite outside the earth. A part and a whole form similar fractal principles, and they are composed of structures being circled and repeated. Due to such circular repetition, the all things in the Nature are connected lie a network. Ecosystem is similar to this principle. The phenomenon that when foreign species enter in a region, then the number of animals in the region are rapidly reduced or native plants are extinguished sill happens. This networkwork is applied to the human society as well as the Nature. Physicist Fritjof Capra applies the fractal theory to the human society. The basic unit of parents and child gradually circles and repeats in its relations with the neighbor, the village, the city and the nation. Each individual is like a point of a network and the all humans are connected in networks regardless of far or near distance and exchanges their influences.

Moon Soo-Man’s fractal series is also similar. Each lump made from the process through several paints are crumpled and pasted looks like a coincidence at first, but the all lumps are arranged according to the artist’s intuition. And the lumps are gradually connected to the vein, like a mountain and like a human’s blood veins. And this is also a metaphorical expression of relation networks in human society. At the same time, it is also the expanded one of bump being accidently formed from the heel of pottery. It is a part of a pottery’s bump from the microscopic view and is also human society’s vein from the macroscopic view. It contains the fractal principle that a part and the whole is the same.

On the surface of fractal having such spatiality, Moon Soo-Man added the temporality of history. Jujak(Red Bird) and Hyunmu(Black Turtle) seen on a mural of a Goguryo’s tomb occupy the center of artist’s celadon, and the mural in Deresden and King Jongjo’s Whaseong march pass the surface of screen. And in the process, the butterfly leaves the surface of screen, and observes the threads of time-space.

The butterfly acquiring the Freedom through the Immersion

Kim Ki-Rim’s poet <Sea and Butterfly>, the white butterfly does not know how deep a sea is and mistakes the sea as a blue radish field, and her wings are wet at going down to the sea. Like the butterfly jumped into the sea recklessly Moon Soo-Man might be a butterfly being wet in sea water. However the immersion on the surface where the butterfly sits, in other words, the immersion to the background which is the artist’s soul became the expansion to the world and formed the space of fractal.

Moon Soo-Man said that while drawing a picture, he reached to the immersion level where he only looked the tip of his brush without feeling anything. Perhaps, such immersion might be generated by his extremely realistic, detailed brushing and repeated touches. And it is the immersion by the expansion to the space of his soul. However, through this immersion process, the artist makes the butterfly freely fly from the surface of screen. Like he might forget himself. Like that, the butterfly gets the freedom and freely crosses the time and the space outside the screen.