SHIM MOON-SEUP

A Preface to the exhibition of Shim Moon-seup, invited by Woonjoong Gallery “Touch the wrinkles of Time” The life of artist Shim Moon-seup seems to be filled with a ceaseless exploration of the essence and origin of things. His numerous works seem like indicators, landmarks, or sometimes daily logs of the journey of exploration. They are simple and clear, but they are so deep and profound that it is almost scary to approach them. That is why it took a lot of courage for me to write this short article about the artist and his works. I hope you will see this as my naive effort to capture a glimpse of his world through my own incomparable thinking. It is widely known that the artist, born in Tongyeong, a city in the southern sea of ​​Korea, developed his sensibilities, emotions, and cosmology he gained from the sea. That is probably why his iron works have fishy smell. Of course, it is because of the iron in them, but for some reason, they make us fall into the illusion or fantasy that we are somewhere by the sea. In front of this difficult phenomenon where their extreme abstractness returns to or is associated with the our very specific real world, appreciating the works makes us fall into a mysterious situation. In the face of the pressure of such unique and serious works, what wavers is the viewers’ psychologies and emotions. Those who create shapes, unlike those who draw, are more sensitive to the material they use. This sensitivity has often been a challenge or an object to overcome in their work. Until now, the eyes that look at art have used how they have overcome this challenge as a criterion for evaluation, but Shim Moon-seup has adopted the properties or nature of materials as the subject of his work. This artist, who has focused on revealing the essence of materials, has been described as continuously practicing the aesthetics of subtraction, or so-called minimalism by eliminating his traces and fingerprints from his works. However, to my eyes, this logic seems somewhat contradictory. In my view, the simpler and clearer his work becomes, the more intensely it reveals the artist's presence, and thus the more natural it becomes, the more solemn it becomes, forming an ambivalent relationship. Even in his works that can be classified as paintings, the purpose and meaning of his work are generally the same. However, while the sculptural forms put more weight on existence, the paintings give the impression that they focus more on the issue of time. Most of the paintings titled are all drawn with energetic brush strokes. Just as in calligraphy, one exerts (human) power to pierce stone by drawing strokes, the color fields created by pushing a wide flat brush seem to represent the energy of nature through the artist's body. On a canvas coated with white oil paint, the artist fills the color fields one by one with a generous amount of blue water-based (acrylic?) paint on the flat brush. None of these color fields are the same. This is an accidental variety that occurs depending on the viscosity or amount of paint on the brush, the strength of the hand holding the brush, and the subtle differences in the chemical repulsion of two paints with different properties. The paint leaves behind countless wrinkles as it dries, and the randomness of these wrinkles, along with the variety of brush strokes, are two important figurative elements that make up his works. Ultimately, his work is an infinite integration of these two elements: variety and randomness. All of his works are reminiscent of the sea. For the artist who was born and raised by the sea, the sea was a great teacher and the first universe he encountered after being born. The universe was infinite and ever-changing, but the artist finally found his own order in the midst of the chaos. For Shim Moon-seup, the standard of order is time. In the sea, time is sensed through waves and tidal fluctuations. He found time broken into small pieces in ocean currents (created by the rotation of the Earth, the revolution of the Moon, and differences in water temperature) and waves (left over water as they are blown by the wind). The artist encountered time in the sea, the beginning and end of which were difficult to determine. The time he encountered in this way penetrated the artist’s memory and was expressed on the screen as color and movement. It is very characteristic that the artist himself becomes gravity or a current. This is an aspect that leads the personalized and reconstructed (Für Sich) relationship of the material to the state of thing-it-self (An Sich). This attitude, which can be called a unity with nature, clearly reveals its originality despite its extremely abstract or expressive form. His work encompasses everything, including the physical properties of water, the energy that stirs the entire ocean, and the color of water that changes depending on the time and place. What the artist represents through his work is an intuitive acceptance, and in a synesthetic sense, a way to recognize “being in the world (in der Welt sein),” which is different from a logical and systematic scientific worldview. It may be unfamiliar, but his works reminded me of ‘tide tables’. I think the aspect of various impressions that are collected sensually accumulating in memory and then being split and divided in time probably led me to this imagination. However, unlike the digital classification table that the scientific world view aims for, the tides of the universe reflected in the artist’s eyes are in vague analog phenomena. He looked at the sea and represented it, building up layers of time. I once said that landscapes are ‘wrinkles of time’, which is also an aesthetic principle established by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. The person who proved that this statement was not so wrong is none other than artist Shim Moon-seup. He embodies the wrinkles of time. The wrinkles seem to be perceived visually, but ultimately come down to tactile sensation. This artist seems to measure time with tactile sensation. March 1, 2025 Kim Jung Rak Historian of Art, Doctor of Philosophy