The breathing of the cosmos – the universe of Moon Chang Dawn The Korean artist Moon Chang Dawn, who has lived and worked in Paris for thirty years, began his artistic career as a sculptor before turning to painting. Through his practice of the art of sculpture, he developed a particular sense of space and depth in his works. Three-dimensional space is projected onto a two-dimensional surface and thus creates relief and depth. Moon is actively interested in the cosmos and expresses the sublimity of space, infinite and marvelous. He captures moments after explosions in the cosmos, after the Big Bang, in a metaphor for the endless process of creation and disappearance taking place in the universe, magnified by the large scale of his paintings. Moon's paintings, filled with micro-movements and events taking place in the entropic process taking place in the universe, reveal a kind of ambiguous and layered plane of immanence. Beyond time and space, his paintings make us feel the order of the universe and experience the cosmos on an imaginary level. They show the process leading to abstraction. The movement that circulates there is free of gravity and off-center. It is a floating movement that continually reproduces itself in a process of expansion and contraction, creation and disappearance, finally becoming an informal figure. This constant process of morphing reveals the state of the image. This informal figure, indefinite and open, is evocative of the circulation of everything that exists and lives in the universe which is deconstructed/reconstructed over time. In other works, simple geometric shapes repeat and overlap like dividing cells that proliferate in a never-ending process in a large-scale construction. In this contradictory way, the informal and the geometric coexist in a process of anti-form similar to the multisensory process of subject formation. In Moon Chang Dawn's two-dimensional works, the space that appears to be filled with vapor as well as the diffused light create a space floating in a gaseous, foggy perception and a sense of mystery. Moon Chang Dawn captures moments of the immaterial breathing of the universe seen as a limitless body. His work suggests the photographic act, and the accumulation of these moments creates an object as a thing in a third ambiguous intermediate space between painting and sculpture. With Moon Chang Dawn, the process of creating art does not follow traditional lines. Moon pours and sprays paint on the canvas, it burns and cools the materials. In this creative action, certain events occur accidentally: it is like breathing and vibration. Cracks appear in the canvas and materials accumulate to varying degrees. The superpositions of strata create the image of a suspended movement, they reveal a process of disappearance, and make time perceptible in space. The boundaries fade and become entangled halfway between the abstract and the figurative, the material and the immaterial. The resulting ambiguous figure, which goes through a whole process of erosion and corrosion, evokes an unknown and strange world, similar to the surface of the moon or an explosion. In fact, everything that exists is in motion. Movement is the image of matter. The works of Moon Chang Dawn allow us to perceive this reality. Moon's practice of the arts of sculpture, painting, and photography perhaps lets us see that these genres can only be different formulations of the question of the essence and disappearance of existence. The immaterial breathing of the universe appears as the metaphor of presence and absence, of corporeal existence and its dissolution, and the detail represents the whole. In this gaseous state, the sensations are multiple, tactile and olfactory. This causes an echo of Vanitas to resonate in floating space. It is a space where Moon Chang Dawn makes us feel the invisible energy bursting into the cosmos as it is brought into existence in the process of birth.

KIM, Sou-Hyeun PhD. The history of art. Curator Busan Biennale (2014)

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