Moon Beom (b. 1955) received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Department of Painting at Seoul National University in 1980 and 1982 respectively. He has held his solo exhibitions at a number of galleries including Galerie Bhak in 1996; Kukje Gallery in 1999; Kim Foster Gallery in New York in 2003; and Gallery Simon in 2011. Moon has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at home and abroad including “The Way of Viewing Objects” at the Seoul Museum of Art in 2006; the 2008 Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporaneo de Sevilla in Spain; “Ethics” at KunstDoc Gallery in 2009; “Embracing the Void” in London at HADA Contemporary in 2011; and “Dansaekhwa: Korean Monochrome Painting” at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, currently MMCA in 2012. He is currently a member of the faculty in the College of Art and Design at Konkuk University.
Moon Beom is an artist who utilizes materiality to create meditative and mysterious images. In his early years, Moon strived to negate conventional artistic genres such as painting and sculpture before realizing that the attempt to overthrow the conventional was yet another prejudiced idea; thus he returned to painting in the mid-1990s. Moon’s paintings are premised on the absence of representation, being unfold from vacuum where there is no object. He has used oil sticks as his primary medium since the mid-1990s and his works are created after rubbing and melting the sticks on canvas. Despite that Moon’s works― with their emphasis on the properties of a material upon the premise of an absence of representation―their abstract forms are reminiscent of such features as a waterfall, cliff, smoke, or forest. Such abstract landscapes evoke the dreamy atmosphere of Joseon Dynasty painter An Gyeon’s “Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land,” while at the same time resemble modern renditions of traditional landscape painting. One can find elements of Korean painting in his works, including the use of blank space and figuration, while the smearing effect of the oil stick resembles that of ink. Moon’s works created with polyacrylic urethane in the early to mid-2000s deliver a silent, calm, and meditative atmosphere rather than the dreamy atmosphere of his oil stick paintings, revealing the unique qualities of the material and the characteristics of monochrome painting.
