Installation view of 《between fog and bone》 (MO BY CAN, 2025) © CAN FOUNDATION

…
From its interior rise quiet whispers,
Is it … the womb of winds?

A poem by Bai Juyi.
In「Kernel of Energy, Bone of Earth : the rock in Chinese art」

The works unfolding in Minjung Key’s new exhibition 《between fog and bone》(MO BY CAN, 2025) begin from a sensation of wind found in an old poem about strange rocks. In long-standing East Asian culture, strange rocks have been regarded as solid symbols like the “bones of the world,” but the artist pays attention to the wind flowing through their holes.

From here, she connects this to the concept of “bone and flesh”(骨肉) in East Asian painting. Bone(骨) refers to line, among the brush techniques of the brush, while flesh(肉) refers to color, showing a painterly way of thinking in which the bones(lines) and flesh(colors) within the picture plane confirm and complement each other’s existence.

Classical baimiao(白描) establishes the subject through the power of line, while mogu(沒骨) reveals form only through color and spreading. Though they may appear outwardly opposed, both methods are long-standing painterly models that show how line and color form relationships with one another.

Installation view of 《between fog and bone》 (MO BY CAN, 2025) © CAN FOUNDATION

At this point, Minjung Key asks: Are the way of drawing bones and the way of drawing fog separate from each other? For the artist, bone is not a solid core but scattered powder, while fog, wind, and clouds are not simple traces but densities that contain moments of generation. Bone is no longer a structure that guards the center, and fog is not an ornament scattered at the periphery.

In this exhibition, the artist draws clouds as if drawing bones, and cuts out bones like scattering stains. At the moment when line becomes color and color becomes line, the crossing of bone and flesh comes alive on the picture plane, and fragments of residue emerge with even greater clarity.

The xuan paper cut out and attached onto metallic panels materially reveals this sensory contrast. Soft paper and cold metal exist simultaneously, while light and air subtly vibrate and seep across the surface. The gray of the metal responds to the surrounding light and becomes an intermediate zone, while the paper that wraps over it and the spreading of ink leave flexible traces.

The surface, where hard metal and soft paper, cutting and spreading, emptiness and residue coexist at once, transforms not into a static picture plane but into a scene with living breath.

Installation view of 《between fog and bone》 (MO BY CAN, 2025) © CAN FOUNDATION

The artist has continued to work with xuan paper and glass as supports, allowing a sense of atmosphere to linger within transparent margins. The margin is not simply an emptied space, but a place of density that pools like gas, and this experiment with metallic materials transforms the condensation of the margin into a new material metaphor.

Moving from glass, which had been a medium of transmission, to a surface of reflection, light and traces collide and coexist more directly on the surface.

Powder scattered across glass, letters carved with a knife, paper cut out with a blade and the remaining fragments, the continuity of broken glass pieces and paper—these allow viewers to experience moments in which structure and flow, original form and residue, condensation and diffusion, hardness and gaseous sensation interlock.

The sensations of collision and transformation that the artist attempts within the picture plane gather into a visual event where form and non-form coexist, allowing viewers to experience the world in which the exhibition title 《between fog and bone》(MO BY CAN, 2025) intersects and vibrates.

References