Overview
Byeong-Doo Moon is an sculptor who over the decades has been using stainless steel wire to express the coexistence of humans and nature in this small universe. From acquiring a sense of unity through countless bending and soldering of sharp and cold wires, he has created work that inquires into the temperature of living creatures and metal, and the symbiosis between and nature.
"Those are elements with a long history, generations long." He said. "Through objects I think of a really long time. I wish when people see the trunk of an elephant they would think how long it took to be those shapes, and through that feel the beauty of them."
"Those are elements with a long history, generations long." He said. "Through objects I think of a really long time. I wish when people see the trunk of an elephant they would think how long it took to be those shapes, and through that feel the beauty of them."
I have been dreaming to be a tree
Through the formulation of the shape of a deer with a bifurcately growing horns which resemble trees with many branches, Byeong Doo MOON represents his critical observation on two themes of the modern epistemology that separates things and beings from the world and places them in confrontational relationships and of the modern ontology that severs body and thoughts.The insight on the former is symbolically expressed in joining a plant and an animal physically in one body form, which is impossible in our epistemological reality. However, he shows, through locating the tree in the place of the horns, that what we believe as two independent beings can be fused as part of each other becoming one and they perhaps appear independent because they may be defined as such in the modern epistemology.
The hybridal 'tree-deer' tacitly expostulates that what has been regarded as separated and severed in our epistemological world, as a matter of a fact, is connected beyond our cognition like the tree on the deer.
His critical take on the latter is also captured through the same motif. If the body of the deer is a human body and the horns is a thought, the basic premise of the modernity, most effectively epitomised in the saying of Descartes, 'I think therefore I am', is quietly negated in the image of the growing horns(tree) rooted(connected therefore as one) stably in the body of the deer.
Also, the body of the deer embodied with the steel wires in the structure of openness is naturally in conjunction with the world. The gaze of the deer facing afar conveys the interests and thoughts of the sculptor to the audience in the cycle and foundation of life-forms that transcends the modern epistemology and ontology.
Through a penetrating discernment that beings are connected with each other and with the world in which they exist, Moon postulates that the Utopia to be aspired if not realised is a space where internally a thought and a body of an existence is unified, and externally such being is not discontinued with the world.
Review: Daekeun Dwayne Kim
© CROSS BAY GALLERY, Sydney Australia