Meet Yerang Moon

We had the good fortune of connecting with Yerang Moon and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Yerang, where are your from? We’d love to hear about how your background has played a role in who you are today?
I was born and raised in Korea. Growing up in an environment that focuses on community, I’ve always asked whether it is possible to keep our identity in a society where we have to share many personal parts of life. I’ve always wanted to break away from the ideal images of human character and behavior that our society expects from its individual. At the same time, I still held a strong desire to belong to my culture.

This experience has always been an inspiring conflict for me. The experience of my inner desire and outer expectations clashing leads me to find balance and adapt in between those moments. I interpreted emotions and amplified them whenever I had to conform to or defy challenges in life. To adapt to the clashing experience and find compromise, I have elaborated the most acceptable explanation for my decision to convince myself.

In the process of finding a balance, I became interested in relationships that build a group. I create images of humans that tread between the abstract and real, allowing figures to tangle with each other. To make each figure indistinguishable, a specific part of each human body is repeated or deleted. As a result, it depicts organically connected bodies that are expressed in color or with a thick texture of paints.

All human beings in my artwork are from the people in my life. Their experiences and my relationships with them provide a series of answers to the questions I ask about my life and culture. I replace linguistic answers with paintings and sculptures. I am dealing with the doubts about whether it’s possible if we can fully understand each other by acknowledging how important the existence of others is to ourselves. Making art allows me to look into my emotions and experiences deeply, which gives me the chance to examine my intangible subconscious.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I exclude depicting one’s exact appearance and think about how individuals can become a collective. The figures are distorted, nude, and ambiguous, but all are connected. I trace the sensory image of my body and picture my previous experiences with people, and free the human form. I am most proud of the liberated forms that I depict. I encourage viewers to throw away all their preconceptions of how they want to be seen by others.

I believe there is nothing distinct in life, nothing completely good or bad, and a person can never be complete. The reason why I am particularly interested in gray spaces is that I believe the conflict between the two extremes impact people a lot to form their identity. Since Identity is a major theme of my work, I aim to visualize unstable situations of one’s inner side by the irregular contours of the characters. With those shapes, I would like to question what our unstable status looks like. Furthermore, through my artwork, I am looking for an answer to how we find harmony in a group of people while having all those inner conflicts.

For me, art isn’t capable of giving definite answers, it questions what seems so natural by showing the inexplicable reflection. Not only in my artwork, but also in the making process, I try to break down boundaries between work and life. All the scenes I make do not originate from a single moment, but from ongoing stories of people I have witnessed. When I work, I first recall images, conversations, and situations from people in my memories. Then I start building images in my head and recombine accumulated moments by painting and sculpting. The vividness from real life is the most important value in my work. I always work on Paintings in front of my bed, so that I can look at them every day to stack stories in the images.

Everything I encounter in life is art, and having a life where expressing my personal experiences is again considered as art. Showing myself through art is like speaking a new language for me. Sharing all the inspiration I get from life, shaping my ambiguous feelings, and listening to viewers’ interpretations are like starting an exciting conversation with strangers. To have as many discourses as possible, I keep paying attention to every moment in my life and doing art.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Most of my favorite places are in Brooklyn. I would recommend my friend to start a day by having brunch at Sally’s. Going to Herbert Von King park or Fort green part will be a next schedule. Rhodora Wine Bar near Fort green is great. It’s also nice to go gallery hopping around Lower Manhattan (But you should get there before 6pm!). Oh and sometimes, some galleries host opening parties on every first day of the exhibition so I’d recommend to check there schedule via Seesaw.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I would like to shoutout to peer artists! They are all talented, hardworking, seeking for lots of matters in the world.

Clore (@clorezzz), Eliza (@livinglike_Iiza), K(@K_Rawald), Morgan(@morganpetitpas), Yeonji(@yeonjichng) and Max(@maxpukuka)! Thank you all. You all always inspire me 🙂

Website: https://www.moonyerang.com/artwork

Instagram: _moonyerang