This conversation opens the first interview of the first chapter in ‘Defining Moments: The First Start or the Turning Moment’. Grounded in the idiom of traditional painting and working along the threshold between figuration and abstraction, the artist sets aside external referents to meet the blank ground, translating memory and feeling into a disciplined visual language. The series ‘心鏡 (Shinkyō, Heart Mirror)’ takes sea fog as its point of departure, unfolding into layers of temporality and place that build a gentle tension and lucid negative space across the picture plane. We follow the energies that initiated the work, the inflection points that redirected it, the fears that tested it, and the shifts in register that followed. Read on for a close look at process and materiality—and for how personal narrative widens in the encounter with the viewer, where meaning comes to rest, quietly, within a coherent body of work. Edited with a light hand for clarity while preserving the artist’s voice. Now, in the artist’s own words.
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Q. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. I'd love to begin by hearing about your practice. How would you introduce yourself as an artist, and what work are you currently engaged with?
A. It is my pleasure to introduce myself as an artist who creates imagined landscapes, each inspired by places I have personally visited. Through the motif of flowing water, I seek to explore the delicate interplay between emptiness and form, allowing my emotions to guide the composition of each work. My intention is to invite viewers to reflect on their own memories and the passage of time as they encounter my paintings. I am particularly interested in capturing vivid yet ambiguous recollections, and in expressing the subtle emotions that emerge from them. Although we may share the same time and space, I believe each individual carries unique memories and feelings. I sincerely hope that my work offers viewers an opportunity to revisit their own personal experiences and emotions.
Q. Could you share what first set you on the path as an artist, or a decisive moment that drew you deeply into your practice? If an image or sensation returns when you think of that time, we would be grateful to hear about it.
A: My path began with a deep affection for Korea’s traditional culture and history. As a child I explored many possibilities, but a teacher recognized my strengths, encouraged me, and guided me toward studying fine art. East Asian ink-and-color painting—known in Korea as Dongyanghwa—initially felt unfamiliar, yet I was grateful and thrilled to learn it formally at university. After my graduation show, my work was selected through a juried open call, and at the exhibition I happened to meet the person who had first helped me take steps toward life as an artist. Later, a former student I had taught traditional painting returned, saying they hoped to become an artist; moments like these remind me that I feel most alive as an artist when I am working, sharing the work, and witnessing the responses of viewers. It is difficult to name a single decisive moment, but certain beautiful memories resurface. For me, love and sorrow are inseparable: we grieve because we love, and we love even in the presence of sorrow.
Q. In your practice, have you encountered periods of slump or difficulty? How did you move through them, and did that process help you clarify your direction or signature? If relevant, did you notice shifts in how others responded to the work or in your studio conditions?
A: Even when life presents a slump, I tend not to be emotionally thrown; the simple fact that I can keep working grounds me. There are hard passages in the studio, of course, but I rarely experience them as “stress.” What challenged me more was locating what felt truly my own—my direction and vocabulary. In my junior year of a BFA program in Korea, I undertook sustained material research and technical experimentation across coursework, moving between figurative and non-figurative approaches; that process showed me more effective ways to foreground the “I” within the work. Although my current themes and methods have evolved since then, that period helped me begin to find my tone. People around me—peers and mentors—started to say they could recognize my sensibility and palette. I also recalibrated my method: I reduced my reliance on reference imagery, keeping it only as a light prompt for memory, and began to build the picture from a blank ground, drawing from feeling and recall. This shift reshaped the studio environment into one that allows deeper concentration on interior states. In short, steadiness has come from process, and direction from staying with the work long enough for its language to emerge.
Q. In your practice, have there been moments of fear or failure? How do you understand those experiences now, and what have they come to mean for your practice?
A. For a long time, I wondered whether a nonrepresentational language, on its own, could sustain visual conviction for viewers. As I searched for what felt truly my own, I realized that many of my limits were self-imposed. Paradoxically, sustained work in description and realism—drawing and painting from observation—has provided a foundation for developing an approach and a body of work better suited to my practice.
心鏡1(Heart Mirror 1), ink on hanji (Korean mulberry paper), 162.2 × 130.3 cm, 2024
Q. It seems that such an experience would have been a significant 'turning point' for you. Following that turning point, how did your artistic world and methodology change? Could you please elaborate on any specific ways your work has evolved since then?
A. Since then, I have been working along the liminal threshold between figuration and abstraction. The ongoing series ‘心鏡 (Shinkyō, Heart Mirror)’ is conceived as an inner landscape—conceptually abstract—yet on the picture plane I allow faint figurative cues to surface as perceptual anchors, at times suggesting terrain, a horizon, or bodies of water. This calibrated ambiguity has become central to the practice: I build atmospheric fields and generous negative space, then let minimal representational signs negotiate scale and place. The register is quieter, with more room for pause and interpretation, and the language of the work has grown clearer as a result.
心鏡14 (Heart Mirror 14),
mineral pigment (bunchae) and water‑soluble dry media on jangji (Korean paper),
162.2 × 97.0 cm
Q. Since that moment, have the messages or values you hope to convey through your work shifted? If so, what changed most meaningfully?
A. In the period that followed, as I engaged with a wide range of exhibitions and artists’ practices, I reflected deeply on where my work sits along a spectrum—from artists who foreground social issues in their work to those who pursue personal narratives. I came to view both approaches as equally valid, even when a message is intensely private or highly cerebral, because art is a means of expressing the many ways we come to understand ourselves and society.
In my own practice, I render personal stories through metaphor, and I have found that the meanings I seek to communicate are enriched by the viewer’s interpretation and dialogue with the work. I hope that, beyond the artist’s intent, viewers are invited to recall their own emotions and memories.
Q. Are there figures, works, or environments that have shaped your artistic identity? And how do those influences surface in the work today?
A: There are many, and they share one thing: they gave me the impulse to keep working. Some remain beside me; others are absent now—but their quiet presence sustained me. My practice begins from private experience, yet I trust viewers carry parallel constellations of memory, people, relationships, and feeling. For that reason my subjects and motifs are drawn to those junctions where attachment meets absence. In material terms, these influences appear less as direct quotation and more as atmosphere, pacing, and register—how I handle edge and light, the intervals of silence across the picture plane. At times a place I visited in Korea, a conversation, or a gesture from traditional painting becomes a trace that guides scale and tone rather than an image to be named. What endures is an ethics of attention: staying with what stayed with me, while leaving space for the viewer’s own correspondences.
Q. Looking back, what does “that moment” mean to you now, and how does it shape your work and life going forward? If you had to capture it in a single word or sentence, what would it be?
A. Sea fog—haemu (海霧) in Korean, formed when warm air meets a cold sea. That moment contains who I was and allows those feelings to take shape, to settle and breathe. I work to hold on to what hurts and yet asks to be kept: fragments of memory and affect that might otherwise disperse. In making, the ordinary day discloses itself as an unfamiliar landscape of recall; the picture plane becomes a site where time condenses and returns. Because we cannot go back or undo, each present moment has grown more precious, and the work has turned toward attention and care—staying with what remains until it surfaces. If I must name it in one word: sea fog.
Q. Looking ahead, what would you say to your future self—or to someone about to begin making art?
A. Visual art, to me, is a way of giving form to the self through looking and making. Direction and inspiration arrive like weather—sudden, unplanned—and cannot be forced; what we can do is make room for them through steady practice. Stay with the work, let process lead, and keep your attention gentle but persistent. If you can carry a quiet joy in the studio, that joy will sustain you—and you will already have what matters most as an artist.
Q. As we conclude, is there anything you would like to add that hasn’t yet found its place in our conversation? Thank you for your generosity—both with your time and in opening your practice to our readers.
A. I am deeply grateful for every chance to bring the work into public view; exhibitions become occasions to encounter the people who have shaped who I am and how I work. We make many promises in the course of a life—some kept, some left undone. Within ‘心鏡 (Shinkyō, Heart Mirror)’, there remain promises I could not keep; I am still keeping one final promise to “you,” an absent presence addressed by the work. Where are you standing now, and what are you looking at? Thank you for staying beside me then, and for helping form the person I am today. For now, I will let you remain on the canvas and turn to hold another state of mind. I wish you fair winds. To those who are reading and looking: among the many drifting memories, where does your own heart come to rest, and what does it face?
Contact
Artist : Seojeong Moon
Instagram : @moorin.art
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