User:Midilyoo

Kyung Won Moon
Kyung Won Moon born 1969 in Seoul, Korea is an artist who practices painting, video, and installation in implicative and narrative methods. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Ehwa Women’s University, Masters of Fine Arts at California Institute of the Arts, and Ph. D. in Communication and Arts at Yonsei University. She has her own realistic vision that is far from the so-called ‘compromising with reality’. Mostly her work is brought into shape through a creative negotiation with the randomness of computer logic, the inner motivation that creates the “communicative space” between the artist and the audience. She had her first solo exhibition ‘Temple and Tempo’ at D301 Gallery in California, USA, and gradually was exposed the public with her concept of a ‘system’, obscure reality.

Moon and Obscure Reality
Her life and philosophy

Moon questions the existing contradiction between reality and ideals and history and individual through mankind, landscape, and specific space in her own peculiar language. She expresses her statement in a moderate manner that consists of applications of media such as painting, video, installations, and so on. Reality for her has always been resided in the lasting landscape that has stayed warm for a long time within the realm of her own memory and consciousness. This reality grows mature in her mind at various fragmented moments and is brought up through her hands. Her work attracts a great deal of sympathy from the viewers. Fragments of time captured in Moon’s drawings and videos display that she is far from the desire to hierarchize, to organize or to label aspects of daily life in which we are immersed. As an artist of her 40’s, Moon processes a figurative character unique to her. Her ability of “microscopic observation and analysis” that reconstructs the concrete world is outstanding; however, the image system of her work functions flexibly reminding us of the notions of sleepwalking, anarchism, or impersonality. The reality brought forth in her work provokes new sensations slowly but surely. Her calm breath and texture of hands accompany the process. Juxtaposition of mental experience and physical representation functions as the major process of creation, also in terms of formal convenience and the validity of the work itself. Moreover, it is a conceptual metaphor that provokes self-reflective consciousness in the chronic mutual conspiracy of the art world.

Media artist, and her works

The works of Moon Kyungwon always contain a bit of herself and of the people and scenes of the world, with particular interest paid to the psychological mold related to the habits of her cast of figures. In this manner, she looks back on her method of reacting to the object and others, and her way of countering the variety of social norms. Moon is not the type to take pleasure in the dangerous space found between the landscapes seen by only her eyes and the scenery of others. Her media rhetoric is felt like a lyric poem, constructed through dialectic relations among scenery, time, handiwork, and technology, so that audience feels like revealing their deepest thoughts. For that reason, when watching her scenery, a phrase, “Seeing incites tangible feel” can pop into the viewer’s mind. Taking in a scene, people already accept it with emotion and expression before they attach a name to it. Her scenery leads viewers to focus on a specific object in a scene, and while they center their concentration on it, they are unable to perceive the scene as a whole. Meanwhile, in her work “Passage: Cityscape Sungnyemun,” she absorbs scenes that surround an object with white and erases it like a cancellation, and by redrawing on the top of it, the object, which was disappearing from our memory is caught and restored to life in the form of an artificial silhouette, reining in the attention of visitors. Also, in “Landscape,” she brings a direct reality scene to the interior by setting up a CC camera outside of the exhibition hall.

One of the methods through which artists using electronic media discover the world and communicate with it, is to fit the pieces of the world counting on mediating views of machines. Another is, before machines’ mediation, to turn their eyes to the contact surface of the existential world over where their own mind and the world meet and filter it with their own sense. In other words, about the objectionable world, facing the “impossibility of speech,” they do not give up, but instead persistently question. These two trends have represented South Korean media artists’ creational experience since the 1990s; Moon seems closer to the latter. It is not important to discuss here whether it is appropriate to categorize Moon as a media artist or not. The important thing is that she set up an aesthetical plan, which can cover “ a machine and reason” dimension and “a body and instinct” dimension all together before she took photos of the world and worked on them with her computer, which helped secure the scenes’ privacy and solidity. Also it is important that she does not limit the objects of her ontological questions to the world, nor loses spirit facing isolation and severance of the world interpreted by media, and instead adopts the existence of drawing media itself, which meets her will to express the world as the object of creation.

Exhibitions
Solo Exhibitions


 * 2010	GREENHOUSE, DoArt GALLERY HYUNDAI, Seoul, Korea


 * 2008 BUBBLE TALK, Total Museum, The Room – workroom/ One & J Gallery, corner gallery/ doART Seoul Window Gallery, Seoul, Korea


 * 2007	Objectified Landscape, Gallery ARTSIDE Beijing, Beijing, China Objectified Landscape, Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul, Korea
 * 2004  Wins of Artist in Residence 2004, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan


 * 2002	Temple & Tempo, Kumho Meseum of Art, Seoul, Korea


 * 1999	The exhibition of 18th Suknam Arts Award, Gallery PARK RYU SOOK, Seoul, Korea


 * 1998	Temple & Tempo, D301 Gallery, Cal Arts, California, USA

Selected Group Exhibitions


 * 2014	Future Perspective: 2084, Quadriennale Dusseldorf, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf (upcoming)
 * 2013	Singapore Biennale, Singapore / Lichtsicht Biennale, Bad Rothenfelde, Germany / Sullivan Galleries, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA / 10th international Group exhibition, YCAM(Yamaguchi Center for arts and media), Japan / Multitude Art Prize, UCCA, Beijing, China
 * 2012	Kassel dOCUMENTA(13), Kassel, Germany / Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea / 2012 Korea Artist Prize, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea
 * 2011	Haein Art Project, Haeinsa Temple, Hapcheon, Korea
 * 2010	A Silent Voice, Tokyo Wonder Site, Sibuya, Japan / Plastic Garden, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China / A Different Similarity, BOCHUM Museum, Bochum, Germany / Asia in Motion_Video Art and Beyond, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan
 * 2008  NOW JUMP, Nam June Paik Festival, NJP Art Center, Yongin, Korea / The 3rd Nanjing Triennial_Reflective Asia, RCM the Museum of Modern Art, Nanjing, China / Modest Monuments, King’s Lynn Arts Centre, UK / The 1st Asian Art Biennale, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Taichung, Taiwan / Visual Sound, CAIS Gallery, Seoul, Korea
 * 2006	Fiction@Love/Ultra New Vision of Contemporary Art, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore / Virtual Conversations across Visual Cultures, Macy Gallery - Columbia University,  New York, USA / Media Scene in Seoul_Merz’s Room, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea
 * 2005	Animate, Anime in Japanese and Korean contemporary Art, Fukuoka Asian Art, Museum, Fukuoka / Paradiso d’Amore-Neo-Aesthetics of Animamic Age, Millennium Museum, Beijing, China / Shanghai Art Museum and Bund 18 Creative Center, Shanghai, China / City Scape_Fukuoka, Tenjin, Fukuoka City Hall, Joho Plaza, Fukuoka, Japan

Awards

 * 2013  The Multitude Art Prize, UCCA, China


 * 2012  The Korea Artist Prize, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea and SBS Foundation & The Noon Award, Gwangju Biennale Foundation, Gwangju, Korea

Collection

 * Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan


 * National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Taichung, Taiwan


 * Monte Video, Amsterdam, Netherlands


 * National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea


 * Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, Busan, Korea


 * Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea


 * Gyeonggi Musem of Modern Art, Ansan, Korea


 * Jeju April 3rd Peace Memorial Hall, Jeju, Korea


 * Hana Bank, Seoul, Korea


 * Phoenix Island - Genius Loci, Jeju, Korea

Quotes and Sayings
"The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it feels as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees." - Octavia Butler (1947-2006), Parable of the Sower