Gallery Hyundai will present a solo booth by artist Moon Kyungwon at Frieze New York 2025, taking place at The Shed from May 7 to 11, featuring nine paintings from her recent series Soft Curtain (2023–2025). A major voice in Korean contemporary art, Moon’s work continues to shape discourses both domestically and internationally through her multifaceted practice in painting, video, installation, and her long-standing collaborative projects with Jeon Joonho. This solo presentation will foreground the artist’s deepening inquiry into the medium of painting, grounded in an exploration of memory, perception, and temporality.

In Soft Curtain, Moon reimagines the landscape not as a static depiction of nature but as a conceptual “curtain”—a permeable surface to be drawn aside. Through this metaphor, she invites viewers to contemplate the invisible layers behind the apparent: the questions, memories, and absences that haunt the pictorial surface. “My landscape,” she writes, “is a curtain a veil through which all questions begin to unfold.”

The series draws from a weaving methodology in both form and concept. Each painting is treated as a densely interlaced field in which time, memory, representation, and reality coexist in fragile tension. By layering brushstrokes, textures, and pigment, Moon embeds the viewer in a visual warp and weft that challenges the conventions of landscape as a passive image. This approach is evident in works such as Soft Curtain_Afterimage II (2024) and Soft Curtain_Afterimage III (2025), where subtle shadows, muted palettes, and blurred contours suggest not what is present, but what is fading, erased, or remembered.

Though these paintings might initially register as serene, they are underpinned by a persistent reflection on the instability of perception and history. The act of painting becomes for Moon a labor of excavation—a means of accessing what lies beneath the surface, suspended between the seen and the unseen, the past and the projected.

This solo presentation not only celebrates Moon’s mastery of painterly nuance but also marks a continuation of her philosophical exploration of the visual field. As Frieze New York welcomes its 2025 edition, Moon’s Booth B06 stands as a contemplative threshold—one that gestures not toward resolution, but toward the productive ambiguity of time and image.

Sayart / Maria Kim, sayart2022@gmail.com