DoArt is pleased to announce its first solo show this year of Kyungwon Moon (1969-), who has been actively building careers in media/installation art. The exhibition entitled GreenHouse will be held at GALLERY HYUNDAI, Seoul and showcase diverse range of her own works including painting, installation and video art.
<GreenHouse> is Kyungwon Moon’s third solo exhibition of recent years, following <Objectified Landscape (2007)> and <Bubble Talk (2008)>. If <Objectified Landscape> was an attempt at casting the shell and exposing the live flesh of a landscape that has become so familiar as to become history, <Bubble Talk> was a project that processively observed and recorded a cityscape from the perspective of floating bubbles.
It was at the group exhibition <Beginning of New Era (2009)> held at the former Defense Security Command (DSC) site that Moon discovered a greenhouse as her new view. With the characteristic intensity of DSC as a place, < Beginning of New Era > was naturally a venue-accentuated exhibition. In that DMZ-like place which had originally been home to Sogyeokseo (National Taoist Temple) and Gyujanggak (Royal Library) before turning into the location for DSC and a military general hospital, Moon “luckily” came across on the rooftop of a rundown concrete building a very foreign site – an abandoned greenhouse with an empty shelf for flowerpots. To explain the presence of the mysterious site, she produced a semi-documentary combining fact and imagination; hence the birth of her video art <Superposition (2009)>. Through the project, Moon realized the richness of a greenhouse as a site for contemplating the differing perspectives between macro- and micro-history, authorized and unofficial history, recorded and individual’s lost history, fact and imagination.
In other words, through <Superposition> Moon opened her eyes to the geopolitics of a greenhouse as she reconstructed the past and present of DSC, and discovered a way of connecting to history that she did not live. And based on the experience, this time she extended her attention to the Greenhouse at Changgyeonggung (Royal Palace) Palace. If the greenhouse of DSC is a preserved remnant of history that has been entirely unknown to people, that of Changgyeonggung Palace, though was not exempt from the tempest of history, is a greenhouse that has been shared and enjoyed by the public. If the former is another facet of history drawn attention to by its absence, then the latter is remains of history still existent but forgotten by most. Such varying geopolitics of greenhouses is what constitutes the theme of Moon’s exhibition.
In the exhibition <GreenHouse>, Moon looked at a greenhouse from both the inside and outside, dismantled and reconstructed it, and ultimately created an imaginary version. Her incorporation of a wide range of media and genres of art, including drawing, painting, video, animation, and installation, enabled a progressive, rather than fixed, exploration of the phase and image of a greenhouse. Moon demonstrated that a greenhouse is a singular site where history and reality interlock and that it can be a significant checkpoint in our life; she has had a greenhouse drifting and flickering in our imagination.
Kyungwon Moon was born in Seoul, Korea in 1969. She received her B.F.A. and M.F.A at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea. In 1998, she received another M.F.A in California Institute of the Arts, CA, USA and continued to achieve her academic accomplishment with her Ph.D in Visual Communication in Yonsei Graduate School of Communication & Arts in Seoul, Korea. She currently lives and works in Seoul.
