Now That You Leave, When Will You Return?

2022 - Painting (Painting)

50 x 72 cm

Young Min Moon

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Young Min Moon’s recent paintings repetitively portray the rituals bound up in the Korean tradition of Jesa. Even amidst the disappearance of many Korean customs, Jesa, a type of Confucian ancestor veneration rites, remains a practice in South Korean society that cannot be easily discarded. Throughout the artist’s childhood, Jesa were the only moments through which he could find peace and safety in times that were rife with violence and commotion. Growing up in a home where Jesa customs were retained despite the predominance of the Catholic faith post-immigration to the United States, the rituals of Jesa remained as acts of manifesting communal solidarity and cultural identity. Stylistically rendered from a towering perspective, Now That You Leave, When Will You Return? features a low-set table, nearly spilling over with various fruits, other traditional Korean foods, and candles. Harboring repetitions of the subject matter and the scene, Moon’s painting appears as a world wherein layers with disparate meanings emerge and perform différance on a single plane, completed as one compact scene where diverse layers that either surround or are associated with Jesa—including death, mourning, family belongingness, and, furthermore, a sense of burden, duty, and responsibility—intersect. In Moon’s repetitive paintings, however, Jesa constitutes a cultural symbol that cannot be clearly acquired or given a single definition; this, in turn, casts an emptiness or uncertainty. The ritual scene can be viewed as going beyond meanings forged by tradition and the individual and as pictorial allegories of personal, social, and communal points of intersection that the artist—who has experienced both the modernization of South Korean society and a diasporic life—holds onto.

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Young Min Moon is a Korean American artist, curator, critic, and art historian, who migrated to the United States from South Korea as a teenager. His realistic painting practice can be genealogically traced to the painting tradition of Korean Minjung art. Moon has also had personal exchanges with Minjung group artists for quite some time. Moon’s artistic practice draws upon his migration across cultures and his awareness of the hybrid nature of identities forged amid the complex historical and political relationships between Asia and North America.

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Colors:

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• culture.n.01
• diaspora.n.01
• loanblend.n.01
• custom.n.01
• religion.n.01
• ritual.n.01