Untitled 2001

Here, we have an untitled artwork by Moon Pil Shim, though the date and materials are unknown. Look at these luscious boxes! Each one is like a little world, a concentrated burst of color and texture. Some are these vibrant, solid hues with horizontal striations made of thin paint, like the magenta and the greens, while others have a more ethereal, atmospheric quality, like the pale blue and white ones. These surfaces draw me in; they remind me of Agnes Martin and her incredible, subtle surfaces, or even the early work of Gerhard Richter. But Shim’s composition, with the boxes stacked together, gives the piece a whole new energy, a sense of modularity and play. I think of them as the building blocks of an abstract language, each box is a letter, and the whole piece is like a poem waiting to be deciphered. What do you think it says?