Young Min Moon

Now That You Leave, When Will You Return?, 2022

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.