<The Flower Sermon: The Buddha wordlessly holding a flower transmitted Dharma to a disciple showing a subtle smile at a moment>

*Through the artwork, passion, and meditation, Hyeja Moon have journey to the gate of Buddhist Dharma. This year the artist put her paintings titled <The Smile of Buddha> forward, which reminds me of the Flower Sermon of the Buddha. In such wordless sermon, the Buddha holding a flower transmitted the Dharma without a word, and the disciple smiled a subtle smile. After the years of the artist Moon’s effort trying to offload from her works she might find herself understood why the Buddha, in his sermon, left words out.

*Before I mention her works of this year, I should look over the previous works in May 2021. They show the balanced compositions of lattice work, a pink lotus on a reddish-brown rectangle in the center. The lotu…

The Quotient of Transcendence in the Paintings of Hye Ja Moon

June 15, 2021

By John Austin

What is most evident in the vibrant paintings by Hye Ja Moon exhibited recently at Artifact is a transcendent reality removed from the everyday, away from the prosaic. The ‘here’ and ‘now’ is made otherworldly and eternal. Colorful geometric patterns and structures is the basis upon which we experience the sense of spiritual. Elements in Hye Ja Moon’s paintings celebrate the understanding of humbleness and the mystery found in the world of imagination. Her very personal style is well crafted and filled with an endearing rectitude; it draws its charge from the intuitive search for exactitude while being quite unconventionally quirky in many instances.

The key to the artist’s creative process is its richness and its deceptive simplicity which resonates with striking contrasts and juxtapositions within each work. Merging viewpoints fused in many…

*From the past till now, in the era of quantum mechanics there have been so many scientists to endeavor to find out the principle of light: Euclid of Alexandria (300BC) mentioned the light went straight on, and René Descartes (1596~1650) stated that colors turned out when light hit the surface of an object.

*In the Newton’s theory of color, the color is the result of objects interacting with already-colored light rather than objects generating the color themselves. However, Renaissance artists knew better. Classical hypothesis still contained the dilemma of transcendental cognition and empirical thought.

*Light and sound refract. That’s for sure. In 2020 - like the past with numerous theories and empirical proofs of light and sound, light and sound refract by gravity all the time, and their waves are finite. Although the newest evidence of quantum mechanics, people tend to stereotype sound as wavy movement and light as straight-forward.

*The latest works by Hyeja Moon can be considered as the landmark that shows her long thoughts in her mind have reached to the starting point of her painting career all the way again. That is “Matisse’s colors and Mondrian’s abstracts geometric.” She titled the works <Compositions of Two Light Sources>. And the two light sources are, of course, Matisse and Mondrian who have long occupied her heart ever. What influences on Hyeja Moon’s work did those two great artists have? Matisse and Mondrian respectively.

*First, according to Matisse, sound is granted its unique characteristic by music, and colors get their beauty by the composition of visual arts. Matisse also had an effort to revive the beauty of pure colors and to limit pictorial details so that he was able to focus on his themes.

*As mentioned above, Hyeja Moon influenced by Matisse also shows a similar usage of colors…