Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Moon’s recent solo exhibitions include 《Rock & Roll》 (Museumhead, Seoul, 2022), 《BEAM ME UP!》 (Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021), 《CLONE TECHNIQUE : SEEKING ELIXIR》 (Factory2, Seoul, 2019), among others.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Issac Moon has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《Minibus, Oort Cloud, Fluttering Pages》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2025), 《White space》 (Soorim Cube, Seoul, 2024), 《UNBOXING PROJECT 3.2: Maquette》 (VSF, LA, 2024), 《The 23rd SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2023), 《Sculptural Impulse》 (Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), and 《Take me Home》 (Platform-L, Seoul, 2019).

Awards (Selected)

Moon was also recognized as a Kumho Young Artist (2020) and was selected for the SeMA Emerging Artists Supporting Program (2017).

Residencies (Selected)

Isaac Moon was an artist-in-residence at SeMA Nanji Residency (2022) and Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture (2021).

Originality & Identity

Isaac Moon adopts the viewport structure of 3D modeling programs and the methods of industrial production, yet he re-enacts them manually to ask fundamental questions about what sculpture is. Works such as Standard Prototype(2016) and Head of St. John(2016) juxtapose machine-generated data with the human body, highlighting the tension between traditional iconography and formal experimentation. In this process, the artist mimics the efficiency of machines while simultaneously embracing the human body’s inherent incompleteness and contingency—its refusal to fully become a machine.

He later expanded this inquiry by presenting the human body as fragmented parts, exploring the relationship between technological reproduction and corporeality. In the solo exhibition 《Passion. Connected.》(Archive Bomm, 2017), his sculptures of human fragments—hands, feet, and heads—appeared as separated and overlapping forms, suggesting human existence as endlessly mutable even within the logic of mechanical repetition.

In his 2019 solo exhibition 《CLONE TECHNIQUE: SEEKING ELIXIR》(factory2), Moon invited image and text influencers to experiment with the concept of “cloning.” The work Makutu and Elixir (3 Week)(2020) reinterpreted the elixir of immortality as a sculptural and virtual device, compelling audiences to navigate the overlap between offline materiality and online experience. In this way, Moon regards sculpture not as a fixed object but as an event that continuously replicates and transforms across media, time, and space.

After the pandemic, his focus shifted toward the presence of nature and material. In works such as Dehiscence – Mt. Bukhan #1(2022), he applied soil collected from mountains directly onto clay plates, transforming the specific topography of Seoul’s mountains and rocks into abstract sculptural forms. The series presented in the exhibition 《Rock & Roll》(Museumhead, 2022) foregrounds how the experience of nature, when coupled with the materiality of soil, allows sculpture to reemerge as both an “event” and a “trace of encounter.”

Style & Contents

Moon’s practice consistently unfolds through the principle of “additive gesture” in modeling. Early works such as A-01(2017) and Head of St. John(2016) employed materials with high plasticity, including Styrofoam and resin, to embody imperfect forms created in the space between mechanical processing and manual labor. Here, material was not merely a tool but an agent that transformed the very meaning of sculpture.

His formal experiments soon expanded into the entire exhibition space. In his solo exhibition 《BEAM ME UP!》(Kumho Museum of Art, 2021), works such as Star Cloud(2021) and Moonlight Circus(2021) captured the moments when images and objects intersect and shift. Made of synthetic resin clay, these sculptures revealed the process through which flat images become three-dimensional, embodying the unstable identity of “artificial objects” in the digital age.

In the later series Dehiscence, presented in 《Rock & Roll》, Moon constructed structures by firing clay and soil plates, which were then stacked and overlapped. These works do not imitate rocks directly but instead evoke their surface sensations in abstract form. By treating soil as an unprocessed sculptural object, he shifted the focus away from the artificiality emphasized in earlier resin works, showing how material itself can determine both the form and content of sculpture.

More recently, in works such as Bust – Windway #15(2024), presented in a group exhibition at Wooson Gallery, Moon combined multiple types of clay and mixed media, further emphasizing heterogeneity and stratification. The collisions between different materialities demonstrate that his “additive gesture” is not simply a technique of construction, but a structural principle for probing the relationships between objects and humans, as well as between nature and the artificial.

Topography & Continuity

Isaac Moon’s work can be read as a sharp response to the predicament of contemporary Korean sculpture. By imitating industrial tools such as synthetic resin, 3D modeling data, and CNC machines, yet re-enacting them imperfectly by hand, he revealed the tension between machine and human. Since 2022, his exploration has turned toward clay and ceramics, emphasizing that sculpture is still grounded in the dimensions of earth and body.

This trajectory is not merely a shift in medium but an attempt to redefine the ontology of sculpture in contemporary conditions. The transition from resin-based to ceramic-based works represents a natural expansion of his practice, in which artificial images and material realities are negotiated simultaneously. This is also evident in long-term projects such as Reconstruct(2014–2025), presented in the group exhibition 《Minibus, Oort Cloud, Fluttering Pages》(ARKO Art Center, 2025).

Within the landscape of contemporary Korean art, Moon occupies a distinctive position by consistently engaging with the problem of the “body that mimics machines but can never fully become one.” His work introduces sculpture as a new circuit of circulation, where industrial objects, natural materials, images, and physical realities intersect to re-question the possibilities of sculpture itself.

Looking forward, Moon’s practice is likely to continue building bridges between the online world of images and the offline world of materiality. His sculptural experiments will extend across the relations between artificial and natural, human and non-human, expanding onto new stages. This direction situates his work as both an inheritance of Korea’s sculptural tradition and an experimental reconfiguration of its ontology under contemporary conditions.