Artist Bio
About Heejung Moon
Heejung Moon, a native South Korean, found her life and career forever changed after watching a scene from the movie Ghost as a senior in high school. The film's depiction of wheeling throwing captured her heart and guided her to choose ceramics as a career. Soon after, she was admitted as a first-tier student to the college of art and physical education at Gangneung-Wonju National University in 1992. She graduated in 1996 with a Bachelor of Arts in craft arts and was accredited as a grade II secondary school teacher. In 2002, she passed the competitive examination to be licensed as a public-school teacher under the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education. During her time as a public servant, she taught computer graphics, homepage design, and ceramics. While at Seoul Technical High School, she chaired the ceramics department from 2014 to 2016. In 2016, she moved to the United States of America with her family where she studied for 30 credit hours at Texas Southmost College as an art major before being accepted to the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley as a graduate student in 2019.
Artist Statement
"Munity"
Non-possession & Minimalism
These works put forth the conceptual framework of Munity as a didactic abnegation of aggrandization. Munity was created with the minimalism by Donald Judd and the philosophy of non-possession by Beop Jeong as informing theoretical backgrounds. Munity emerges from the intertextuality of such theoretics to a conceptual framework. In other words, these works express how Munity as a conceptual framework functions in my artistic philosophy.
“Mun” is an alternative spelling for my surname “Moon” in Korean. This is combined with the English nominalization of “ity”. Therefore, the essence of me or myself is expressed in the concept of “Munity”.
Munity exists within the intertextuality of Minimalism and Non-possession. The characteristics of non-possession (concentration, simple living, breaking attachments, and disengagement) textually come together at a point with the characteristics of minimalism (lack of containership, lack of illusion, continuity, thingness, and being interesting). That point of intertextuality is what this artist deems Munity.
As a concept, Munity includes three Korean aspects: 1) Ma-dang (space), 2) Gu-chae-wha (materialization), and 3) Pil-so-yu (necessary possession). In Munity, it is not possible to conceptually separate Ma-dang, Gu-chae-wha, and Pil-so-yu. They are all part of an integrated whole. Ma-dang is the aspect that expresses all domains (whether psychological, digital, virtual, legal, physical, etc.) of space where things are. That is, Ma-dang is the totality of all spaces wherein materializations (i.e. Gu-chae-wha) takes place. Gu-cha-wha is the instantiation of things (whether psychological happiness, digital storage, virtual appearance, legal rules, physical size, etc.) in a domain of space (i.e. Ma-dang). Without a materialization, there is no space, no Ma-dang. Analogously, if there no were stuff inside the universe, there would be no universe. The determination of what materializations take place in which domains of Ma-dang is the role of Pil-so-yu. Pil-so-yu controls the formation of the materializations in a particular Ma-dang and the organization of that Gu-chae-wha to other materializations in other particular domains of Ma-dang. The existence of space itself is a requirement of Pil-so-yu. How can ownership, possession, or management occur without a domain for its occurrence? It is the requirement of Pil-so-yu for a domain to exist in which materializations happen.