Judging by the evidence presented in this intoxicating retrospective, Moon Shin (1922-1995) might have had a remarkable career as a painter and perhaps go on to secure a place in the canon, but instead, he established himself as one of South Korea’s preeminent sculptors. . In the 1940s and 1950s, after art school in Tokyo, he fluidly recorded slices of everyday life in South Korea – a farmer lounging near a cramped chicken coop or a fish peering into a basket – with the concise eloquence of a Park Soo-keun and the thick color of a Georges Rouault. Moon was inventive, and he moved in the right circles; he was a member of the Modern Art Society alongside rising legends such as Han Mook and Yoo Youngkuk. But he was also restless.
In 1961, Moon left South Korea for a few years in France. He did carpentry and stone-cutting work in a castle north of Paris where the Hungarian sculptor László Szabó ran a residence, and his art underwent rapid change. He embraced the language of informal art with characteristic élan, making restrained, playful abstractions with rough surfaces, and he also began to seriously experiment with sculpture. After a brief return to South Korea in 1965, he moved to France and devoted himself there with zeal. As if to commemorate his dramatic change, he erected a Brancusi-style column – two sets of wooden hemispheres rising over forty feet – during a performance on the beach in Le Barcarès, France, in 1970.
Over the next quarter century, Moon produced abstract sculptures that were as alluring as they were idiosyncratic. Often no more than a few feet tall, they are composed of ovular shapes and curved planes that look like they have been pinched, pulled and hollowed out to become birds, flowers, organs or extraterrestrial body parts. Although still polished smoothly, their forms have been hard-earned, carved from woods such as ebony, oak or yew, or forged from bronze or stainless steel. They tend to stand upright, address you head-on, and exhibit a kind of not-quite-perfect symmetry, which reinforces the odd feeling that they’re organic beings, though they’re elusive and not found; some can be more than a little disconcerting to see. Dozens were displayed together here with the occasional circular overhead mirror and a touch of sneaky jazz, so the dimly lit galleries looked like a sci-fi bestiary.sperm-nightclub.
What prompted Moon? “If there’s anything I hope for,” he once said, “it’s for the forms I create to come to life and end up meaning ‘life’.” His sculptures do this with ease, while rejecting categorization. He named several Towards the universe— he seemed to be chasing universal, albeit unnamable, sensations — which the curator of this investigation, Hyesung Park, took as the title of her show. In a richly documented catalog, she links Moon’s freewheeling practice to his busy nomadic biography: Born in Japan to a Korean father, who was a migrant worker, and a Japanese mother, he was sent to the five years old in Masan, his father’s hometown on the southern tip of Korea, who will be raised by a grandmother; at sixteen he snuck off to Japan to pursue art.
In 1980, Moon moved from France to Masan, a famous figure, and set about designing every aspect of a museum there for his art. In 1988, a piece of steel reminiscent of his Endless Column was erected in Seoul’s Olympic Park, and his sculptures now dot public spaces across the city. At a glance, some may seem quirky or old-fashioned, like artifacts of vanished futures – a little too trusting, utopian or extroverted for our times. But give them time, and they will grow in you. I’ve come to think of them as special old friends who shine in their eccentricities, holding secrets about the past and ready to regale you with whatever’s still possible.
