In the 1960s, the Japanese art world was passing through its most provocative and experimental period yet, asking the fundamental question of what art is. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were followed by a string of major international events, including the 1970 Osaka World Expo and the Tokyo Biennale. Postwar Japan had achieved rapid economic growth and advanced industrialization, but in the art world, anti-art and avant-garde movements resisting the established order surged instead.
The movement rejecting traditional painting and sculpture was also pronounced. Artists left museums behind to stage performances in urban spaces, displaying an attitude of rupture and avant-gardism. The Gutai group, which emerged in the late 1950s, stood at the center, and its spirit carried into the 1960s. Its approach of handling diverse materials — paint, everyday objects, earth, water and stone — on the basis of physical human action formed one pillar of postwar Japanese avant-garde art.
In the late 1960s, Mono-ha emerged, combining an East Asian view of nature and philosophy in response to Western minimalism. Artists placed unprocessed materials such as stone, iron plates, wood and earth in space with minimal alteration. Attempts to reveal immaterial elements such as gravity and time also continued. This was a reflection on the excess of objects brought by rapid industrialization and urbanization. At the same time, it prompted a reconsideration of how humans relate to their surrounding environment.
Among the Korean artists active in Japan during this period, Lee Ufan, Kwak In-sik and Kwak Duck-jun are well known. But there was another artist: Moon Seung-keun, known in Japan as Noboru Fujino. Born in Japan in 1947, he was a second-generation Korean resident of Japan who died at 34. His name is not widely known in Korean art circles, but he is counted among the important artists of the Japanese avant-garde.
Japan at the time was a place where the currents of international contemporary art could be observed firsthand. Young artists like Moon were able to absorb new art quickly and build their own bodies of work. He studied art on his own from the 1960s. Aiming at self-realization as an artist, he pursued experimental and critical work across a range of media — prints, oil painting, watercolor, three-dimensional work, installation and video. Gutai's influence was part of this as well.
Moon suffered from kidney disease from his elementary school years and had to fight illness all his life. He began in art as a self-taught artist. Those conditions instead drove him to work all the more intensely. After holding a solo exhibition in 1968, he submitted work to the 21st Gutai Exhibition, and in 1969 he received the Art Publishing Prize at the 5th International Young Artists Exhibition. Lee Ufan took the grand prize that year. Moon built his own distinctive style while ceaselessly asking and answering what art is and what expression is.
In his early years of activity, he did not reveal his identity as a Korean resident of Japan. Then, beginning in 1971, he started using his Korean name, Moon Seung-keun. In the 1950s and 1960s, when he spent his youth, Koreans in Japan had to grow up as "foreigners" in Japanese society, belonging fully to no single country. For those who came of age in the late 1960s, the question of who they were was unavoidable. The same was true for Moon. A young man who might well have appeared in the drama "Pachinko" was in fact living through that era.
One day in 1978, Moon told Lee Ufan that he was Korean and confided his struggles over identity. Lee looked back on that moment in a memorial-exhibition essay in 1984: "A man who knew the pain of not being honest with himself, a friend who always carried some kind of hurt within him and kept challenging himself in his work — that was Moon Seung-keun." Moon himself said in another interview in 1978 that art divorced from one's actual existence is not genuine. His own existence and his authenticity as an artist were inseparable matters for him.
"Untitled" was produced around this time. The surface deepens in color as it descends from pale yellow to dark brown. Dark lines divide it at regular intervals. The same rule repeats from top to bottom, so that at a glance it appears uniform. What matters, however, is the minute variation that arises within the repetition. As the artist's actions accumulate, the surface too gradually changes.
The work is a watercolor inspired by roketsu, a traditional Japanese dyeing technique in which wax blocks dye from penetrating the cloth. He built up transparent layers by applying color again and again. This kind of transparent, repetitive brushwork appears in both Moon's prints and his watercolors. It was not unrelated to his family's livelihood. His parents sold textiles and worked at a weaving mill. It was natural that a sense of color and texture derived from weaving should seep into his work. The print that won an award at the 1st Contemporary Japanese Print Grand Prize Exhibition in 1977 was also made by letting developing solution soak into photographic paper. The influence he took from dyeing and weaving can be seen running through his work as a whole, across genres.
In the 1980s, he repeatedly used a method of applying one layer of color and then painting another color over it. The same action proceeds from top to bottom, yet the surface changes little by little. Whatever the material, he made dots, drew lines and created patterns according to a fixed rule. He built up an even grain, as if weaving. Brushwork in which no clear beginning or end can be found at any edge of the surface calls to mind the infinity of time, space and thought extending beyond the picture plane. "Untitled (Gray)" and "Untitled (Yellow)," in the collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, are works that emphasize materiality by texturing paper and then printing over it with paint.
The method running through Moon's work is the repetition and accumulation of brushstrokes. He piled traces onto the surface by repeating the same action. This can also be read as a kind of existential defense mechanism and process of self-confirmation, a way of holding onto his identity as a person on the border, a second-generation Korean in Japan. The countless traces left on the surface were an intense record proving that, amid physical and mental suffering, he existed as a human being and as an artist.
His health kept deteriorating, but he did not stop working. He gradually gained opportunities to present work in Korea as well. In 1982, he exhibited as an overseas-based artist in Korea and as a representative Korean artist in Japan. That year, however, he died of his chronic illness at the age of 34. Three of the works by him now in the collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, were donated that year by his nephew, Seiji Fujino.
The artist died young, but reappraisal of his work has continued. In 2007, the Chiba City Museum of Art held a two-person exhibition pairing him with Tadashi Yagi. The show examined from multiple angles the experimental character of Japanese contemporary art in the 1970s and 1980s and the critical consciousness of its avant-garde. Moon, too, was brought back into the light as an artist long overlooked. In 2014, the Gwangju Museum of Art held a retrospective, "Moon Seung-keun: Poem of Infinity." The exhibition selected and presented works by Moon from among those donated by Ha Jung-woong, a Korean-Japanese businessman, and impressed his existence on the Korean art world once again. His works are now held by major Japanese museums, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the National Museum of Art, Osaka; and the Chiba City Museum of Art.
Ryu Ji-yeon is director of the collection and archives division at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.
