Untitled 2002

Curator: Here we have an acrylic on canvas, an "Untitled" piece from 2002 by Moon Pil Shim. What strikes you initially about it? Editor: Honestly, it reminds me of staring out at the ocean at twilight. All those shades of blue...it’s incredibly calming but also slightly melancholic. Curator: The stratification is certainly key. Notice how Shim divides the canvas into horizontal bands of varying tonal intensity, generating a field reminiscent of color-field painting, but tempered through the language of geometric abstraction. Editor: Geometric abstraction sounds so clinical! But you’re right, there’s a deliberate order here. It's like the ocean, but an ocean carefully measured and charted. Do you think the hard-edged lines mean something specific? Curator: Lines are never neutral, are they? Here, they structure our reading of the work. Think of the hard-edge painting movement and its quest to move beyond the gestural in Abstract Expressionism. The acrylic medium furthers this flatness of affect. Editor: The almost mechanical precision feels very intentional, like a rebuttal to the more emotionally charged works of that period. And it has this quality like we could keep zooming in, but there’d be no hidden layers. Just… more blue. Curator: Exactly. It speaks to modernism's drive for reduction, focusing on the materiality of the paint and the canvas itself. Editor: But I can't help but find a trace of the romantic. The depth created just through different densities of that one color invites us to meditate. To sink into that infinite blue, if that makes sense. Curator: Perhaps the hard edge functions not as limitation, but as a framework, through which a sense of sublime boundlessness can be glimpsed? Editor: Possibly. Either way, staring at this makes you think differently about something as seemingly simple as the color blue. Curator: Indeed. It invites us to reconsider what we see as the boundaries of abstraction. Editor: Precisely, and that's always a worthy endeavour for a piece of art.