Please join us for an Artist Talk by Young Min Moon on Wednesday, March 28 at 1 pm in the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts. The talk, entitled “Ways of Kneeling,” focuses on the artist’s repeated imagery of a back view of a kneeling man in a suit. Moon states, “These images are based on a significant experience from my upbringing in South Korea: Jesa, a Confucian ritual performed as a remembrance of spirits of ancestors and funerary rite of mourning for the deceased. Growing up in the South Korean military regime of the 1980s in which violence was a norm everywhere, including classrooms, the austere moments of silence during prostration have become one of the most important memories of mine.”

Young Min Moon is an artist and critic whose work reflects 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. In his paintings and text-based works, Moon represents loss, mourning, and reflection on violence. He has shown his art in many exhibitions in South Korea, the U.S., and Canada. Moon has also written extensively on contemporary art in South Korea. He published a bilingual Korean-English catalog for his curatorial project “Incongruent: Contemporary Art from South Korea,” and contributed scholarly essays to Rethinking Marxism, BOL, and the anthology Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader (MIT). He is also on the editorial board of Trans Asia Photography Review, http://tapreview.org. Recipient of 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, Moon is Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. http://youngminmoon.net

This Artist Talk is organized by Prof. Sohl Lee, Department of Art, Stony Brook University, and sponsored by The Center for Korean Research at Columbia University and the Center for Korean Studies at Stony Brook University.