- Title
- Possible Worlds #9021
- Culture
- Korean
- Date Made
- Post 1945, 2014
- Medium
- acrylic, ballpoint pen, and varnish on canvas
- Dimensions
- 57 × 44 in. (144.78 × 111.76 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.2017.256
- Collecting Area
- Chinese and Korean Art
- Curatorial Notes
Moon Beom’s acrylic-and-ink paintings are hybrid creations: while minimal in nature, his abstract forms resonate with traditional landscape filtered through imagined or metaphorical space. The result is a meditation on painting itself, an interrogation of what constitutes “landscape” in both Western and Korean culture, and a dialogue between interior thought and exterior perception. In Possible Worlds #9021, the artist’s choice of materials adds a layer of complexity. Here, Moon’s spectral formations, suggesting craggy mountaintops and swirling clouds, are rendered with a nontraditional red ballpoint pen rather than the customary black ink and brush, and emanate from an acrylic ground of robin’s-egg blue. Viewed up close, the stunning red forms against light blue bring the use of the ballpoint into sharp focus. Distance restores the hybridity of interior and exterior, highlighting the ambiguity of time and space and the realm of the possible suggested in Moon’s title.
Virginia Moon
2024
