Sujin Moon Critical Essay
Garth Grimball
What part of a sculpture elicits marvel? The most common experience of sculpture, in a gallery or museum, is to walk around a pedestal as if testing the object’s three dimensionality. If the sculpture is large enough to be protected by a line on the floor, viewers are told, “please do not touch.” From an acceptable distance sculpture is considered not sensed. Only considering the finished form limits the scope of the medium. We become detached from the action of sculpting. Marvel emerges in the sculpting.
Sujin Moon sculpts. Her work concerns the body and performance as much as any molded object. Time, natural elements, the interplay of weight and effort alchemize in her sculpting. The immaterial is equal to the material. For Moon sculpture is an inclusive art. To experience her work is to ask, what isn’t sculpture? Which is not to say her work is vague or undefined. Her specificity lies in the ability to make room for the unknown, to allow the process to surprise her.
The biggest circle I can draw (2016) intimates the story of Giotto and Pope Benedict XI. When the Pope requested an example of Giotto’s work to be considered for a commission,Giotto sent a hand-painted perfect circle. He got the job. Moon uses her whole body to achieve the same mastery. Like a human compass she fixes her right big toe to an imagined center and stretches her body to its limit with a piece of chalk in her right hand. Slowly she builds the curving line. Inch by inch her left foot and arm muscle the line of her body, the line of the compass. She has the taut concentration of a rock climber. Moon stops at points to slough off pieces of the chalk’s paper wrapping. The focus shifts from her body and the line to the material.The transfer of matter, like ice to water, appears as the solid chalk decomposes in the composition of a circle.
The title, The biggest circle I can draw, encompasses the tenets of Moon’s work. She tests her endurance and focus as if responding to a dare. You want to see the biggest circle I can draw? Well, here it is. Lying stretched on the ground she can’t see her progress or accuracy. Invisibility as another limitation. The circle forms not from hand-eye coordination but trusting sensations. Watching her muscles strain and relax elicits a kinesthetic response. Are my muscles cramping or am I slowly contorting myself into her shape during the 17 minutes it takes for the ends to meet? The body, the chalk, and the surface merge into an experience: circle making.
For Living Island (2020) Moon combines found object and land art with an infusion of dreaminess. During a residency in rural Maine she walked onto a frozen lake and shoveled snow into a huge mass. The simplicity in action belies the wonder in reaction. Moon filmed the process. The opening shot is like an Impressionist painting. Heavy snowfall covers the landscape. On this blank canvas a single figure trudges away from the camera into obscurity.Cut to a mound of white presiding over the naturally occurring contours of a wind-sliced snowpack. Original music by Jeon Yeongjun duets with the sound of wind. The soundscape mirrors the sculpture—natural elements remixed by human craft. The film presents the sculpture like a found object by editing out its creation. As if it just landed on its spot like a sci-fi monolith.
A collage of shots over several months transform the mound into an island. As it melts a pool collects around the perimeter. The weight of a metaphor can collapse the physical form. Does the melting represent climate change? Is the isolation of the sculpted mass akin to social isolation? Seeing the island melt down to a remnant of its former self, are we meant to think about how time weathers us all? Living Island encourages interpretation and remains intact against the limits of interpretation. The film ends with the same figure walking towards the camera. The landscape is serene and sun-filled with green trees. Moon brought the island to life and witnessed it dissolve into its original form.
Distinctions between artwork and artist blur for Sujin Moon. There is no separation between the weight of her body and the weight of her material. Weight renders time into a physical feeling. Time continues. Weight changes. Feel the weight of time. The feeling syncs with the time of the material and its environment. Sometimes the body itself is the material; its weight is known but the environment is a mystery to be located.
While attending the MFA program at The School of Art Institute of Chicago, Moon’s sculpting became acts of locating. Into the Grid: hiding in public (2019) and From the Grid(2018) are a mixed-media diptych of dislocation and location. Into the Grid sees Moon carrying a mirror around downtown Chicago. In photographs and video she hides herself behind are flection. In many of the photographs it takes a moment to locate her mirage, like an invisible Where’s Waldo? This visible invisibility actualizes the experience of being in a place but not of a place. Anonymity feeds freedom and loneliness. Moon is free to play in the unfamiliarity of foreign space, uninhibited by collective routines. But the photographs suggest a loneliness of being without the compass of memory. Where are you when no one knows you and you know no one?
The video captures the awkwardness of hauling a human-sized reflector through intersections, negotiating distance, bulk, and passersby. Seeing Moon struggle with the weight and dimensions of the mirror only to peek from behind with a look of giddy transgression feels like the work of translation. After hours of memorizing and conjugating, meaning suddenly clicks. Moon locates the complexity of being new to a place in her body and the reflection of others.
From the Grid renders the cityscape soft through textiles. When Moon arrived in Chicago she was struck by the grids within grids. She describes walking around the downtown Loop as disorienting; the intersecting streets and the rows upon rows of skyscraper windows blended into an uber-grid. Using a natural-synthetic fiber blend Moon sewed city planning into tapestries.Buildings and thoroughfares are reduced to squares and lines. The fabric bunches or folds in places like the histories built into the city’s structure. Streets thick with protests, policy, and populations. Moon presented these soft sculptures from the view within a high rise apartment.Hung on the windows like drapes, the city bleeds through the transparent parts. Hard and soft materials, the real and the imaginary meet.
Implicit in an analysis of Sujin Moon’s work is the digital. She is a sculptor. Much of her work is site-specific and widely shared via filming and digital presentation. How many people experienced Living Island in real life? Does it matter? To borrow another Renaissance tale: the feud between Leonardo and Michelangelo. Michelangelo claimed sculpture was the “real” art because it is three dimensional. Leonardo countered that painting was the truer art because sculpting was labor that caused one to sweat, therefore not fine art. Within this apocryphal exchange is the tension present in much of Moon’s art. Her work hurdles over distinctions and dimensions. The digital divide invites a closer viewing rather than extending the distance between art and viewer. Editing, like sculpting, shapes transitions. Whether experienced as an image, an object, or a performance, she is sculpting. What emerges is marvelous.