국립현대미술관

Moon Shin was born in 1922 at a coal mining town in Kyushu, Japan, to a Korean father who was a migrant worker and a Japanese mother. Whether by fate or coincidence, his life as a ‘stranger’ began in this way. At the age of five, Moon moved to his father’s hometown in Masan, Korea, and spent childhood under his grandmother’s care. When he turned sixteen, he went to Japan to study painting. Following the liberation of Korea, Moon returned to Korea and started an active career as a painter travelling back and forth between Masan and Seoul. At the age of forty in the midst of his career, however, the artist left the country again for Paris. It was after twenty years that Moon returned to his hometown. And at this time, he was famed as a ‘sculptor,’ not a painter.

Moon Shin spent most of his life as a stranger. But for him as an artist, this was not a misfortune but something that rather drove him to a true creation beyond ever-changing trends, narrow-minded factions, and nationalism. Strangers travel constantly, unshackled from any hometown or settlement. And to better adapt to an unfamiliar land he arrives at, he cleverly and diversely develops nodes with others and closely explores his surroundings. As the result, a stranger comes to embody a kind of hybridity that cannot be casually described in terms of an ethnic border. The boundaries Moon Shin transcended were not limited to geographic, ethnic, or national ones. He not only moved his realm from painting to sculpture, but also expanded it to the areas of crafts, interior design, and architecture, breaking away from the set concept of genres and freely crossing the borders of life and art. Moreover, he transversed multiple dichotomous borders between the East and the West, traditional and modern, figurative and abstract, organic and geometric, carving and modelling, form and content, original and reproduction, material and spiritual eventually to find the exquisite balance between the two opposing terms. When viewed in this context, one of the most prominent features of Moon Shin’s sculptural works, ‘symmetry,’ comes to imply something beyond a simple bilateral symmetry in form and structure.

As a potential wanderer, Moon Shin was in multiple ways a disparate figure in the history of Korean modern art. This retrospective exhibition of Moon Shin, organized to celebrate the centennial anniversary of the artist, diverges from previous attempts to establish a fixed position for him in art history, founded upon a grand narrative and discontinuously described. Instead, the exhibition seeks to explore multifarious terrains of Moon Shin’s art and provide an opportunity for today’s audience to experience and be inspired by the freedom, passion, and tension the artist had as a stranger of his time. This exhibition’s subtitle ‘Towards the Universe’ comes from the title Moon gave to a number of his sculptural works from the mid-1970s to the 1990s. To the artist who believed that “human beings dream of invisible future (the universe) while living in the reality,” ‘the universe’ was something close to the ‘root of life’ that he explored all his life, an unknown world or a hometown open in every direction. In this way, the phrase ‘towards the universe’ implies Moon Shin’s aspiration for the origin of life and creative energy, as well as his way of life that never sank inward but reached outward for new challenges.