Moon Bong-sun’s work is always vacant or full. A plane unfolding in his work will appear empty or covered with dense fog. Landscapes he depicts appear complete and not fragmented. In Moon’s work, a part is an extension of the whole. A lonely tree stands on a horizontal plane, and tall weeds flourish. His landscapes appear subdued. Unfolding planes are serene within the dim view. Tranquil landscapes appear exceptionally lonesome. The remaining trace of a setting sunlight ripples through our heart like the tide.

His landscapes unusually captures a moment of sunsets or the early dawn, before the sun risesand shines brightly. It is the time when objects are about to disappear, or about to wake up.In his painting, boundaries between light and shade gradually blur, and contours slowly appear. A pine tree standing near a path where dusk falls erupts with vitality in a silhouette. The mountain is a mass over the river looking heavy, absorbing light. Moon’s work begins from firsthand sketches of nature. His bamboo and apricot paintings are not idealized, as seen in Jeziyuanhuazhen,a collection of the paintings featuring the four gracious plants, birds and insects, flowers and birds.

It is a rare thing to sketch the four gracious plants – the plum, the orchid, the chrysanthemum, and the bamboo – direct from reality. Every spring, Moon visited Gwangyang’s apricot field to sketch real apricots, so as to capture the reality of objects. At a remove from conventional methods of Oriental painting, Moon is faithful not only to nature but to himself. His painting is thus not simply idealized landscape. There is also invisible winds and sunlight. Colors of the wind and the breath of sunlight are sensed by the heart, not by the eyes.

His landscapes are not seen as a location, but an experience, felt in our hearts after walking through it. His scenes are born, when nature fuses with humanity as one, rather than through confrontation between beings. The smell of dry or wet soil can be sensed in the emaciated edge of green plants he depicts. The sky overflows with wind and sunlight, wrapping up our body. The object of his painting appears directive, or it is represented by simple brush marks, or ink spreads. His work’s paradox lies in the fact that his work begins from reality, but pursues an ideal world. In this paradox, where he remains in nature, but suddenly tries to escape from it, Moon’s work presents pictorial autonomy.

While some are characterized by the contrast of black and white, others are featurecomposition intersecting vertical and horizontal elements. He seems to seek an absolute formal logic. The amazing state of his art remains at a distance from nature, despite its departure from within nature, in perhaps an ideal way all Eastern artists have strived for.

I recall what Laozi said “The Way that can be told of is not an unvarying way.”. The nature depicted as it is is not nature any longer. We can reach its true nature when trying to departing from it. Moon’s work seems to show its absolute, true nature rather than its outer appearance as it is.