Shim
Moon Seup

Harnessed From Nature

May 6 - September 30, 2026
Ca’ Faccanon, Venice

Venice Biennale

Nature Sculpts

May 6 – September 30, 2026
Ca’ Faccanon, Venice

Nature, a self-generating presence

In dialogue with the 61st Venice Biennale, Shim Moonseup: Nature Sculpts unfolds at Ca’Faccanon (calle delle Acque, 30124 Venezia VE), the historic former post-office building near the Rialto Bridge, from 9 May to 22 November 2026. The exhibition traces the artist’s sculptural continuum through twenty eight works—painting, sculpture, and installation—drawn from his major series. Each piece marks a decisive moment within more than five decades of practice, from his debut at the 1973 Paris Biennale to new works completed in 2025.

Shim Moonseup has achieved international recognition through over thirty solo exhibitions in leading cities worldwide. Emerging from the late-1960s Korean Avant-Garde (AG) movement, he advanced the radical notion of “anti-sculpture,” a concept that resonated with contemporaneous currents such as Mono-ha, Arte Povera, and Land Art. As the first Korean artist invited to exhibit in Paris’s Jardin du Palais-Royal, Shim presented his works alongside Daniel Buren and Niki de Saint Phalle, imprinting Korean contemporary sculpture upon the global consciousness.

Throughout the 1970s he participated in the Paris Biennale three times in succession, later extending his presence to the São Paulo Biennale (1975), Sydney Biennale (1976), and Venice Biennale (1995, 2001). His artistic stature was further affirmed by the Excellence Prize at the 2nd Henry Moore Grand Prize Exhibition (Japan, 1981). In 2007, the French Republic recognized his lifelong contribution with the Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Shim’s trajectory demonstrates how an artistic language grounded in Eastern philosophical contemplation can expand into a universal aesthetic discourse. Over time, his creative axis has shifted from the anthropocentric to the eco-centric, relocating the source of art from human agency to nature itself. The artist perceives within the prima materia—earth, stone, wood, light, and water—a latent current of prima energeia, the formative energy that animates all matter.

Here, nature ceases to be a passive material. It becomes an autonomous, self-generating presence. Shim positions himself not as a maker but as a condition setter, one who establishes the minimal circumstances through which nature may reveal its own formative intelligence. Hence the title does not imply that man sculpts nature but that nature sculpts.
Yet these works are neither untouched “ready mades” nor static displays of natural artifacts. They are collaborative processes, in which creation remains perpetually in progress. Shim’s sculptures inhabit the temporal field between formation and dissolution—works not concluded but continuously unfolding, as if nature were still sculpting in real time.

Prima Energeia and Reincarnation

In Korea, Shim Moonseup is primarily known as a sculptor; yet in recent years abroad, he has become more widely regarded as a painter.

However, from a young age he worked not only in three-dimensional forms, but across painting, photo-drawing, photography, sculpture, and installation—experiencing and employing an expansive range of material vocabularies and expressive methodologies.

His works may now be provisionally grouped into eight broad thematic fields, which will be introduced briefly in the sections that follow.

Harnessed From Nature – Venice Biennale

Metaphor

Wood Deity

Thoughts on Clay

Relation

Opening Up

Opening Up

Opening Up, 60x50cm(4 pcs), 1975, Cloth, Sandpaper

Opening Up marks the critical threshold at which Shim Moonseup elevated time to the very essence of sculpture. Here, sculpture is no longer conceived as a discrete material form but as the trace, abrasion, and movement left by time itself. Through the act of sanding the canvas, he reveals that the erosion of time is not merely a physical effect but a sculptural principle.

Within the abraded, wounded surface lies the irreparable trauma of the Korean War—trauma the artist personally endured. This wound, inscribed materially, extends toward a deep empathy with those whose suffering remains unresolved in the present. Shim does not simply remove a surface or cut an injury into it. Rather, he activates a sculptural gesture that opens sensory depth and existential presence—an opening toward the conditions of perceiving, and the conditions of being.

Relation

Relation(Place), 300x148x135cm, 1972, Paper, Stone (remake)
Relation(Circumstances 5), 300x165x330cm 1972, Wood, Canvas (remake)

In Relation , the torn paper, unaltered stone, empty canvas, and wooden supports together shift sculpture from a discourse of “object” (Seiendes) toward a discourse of “being” (Sein). Sculpture ceases to be a thing, and becomes a mode—a relational field constituted by intervals, resonances, and the charged space between elements. Relation is not a sculptural object; it is the way it stands, the way it is placed, the way it becomes a spatial constellation of gaps to be perceived. In Relation (Place), the act of tearing paper ruptures the premise of completion and perfection. This rupture is not a formal accident, but an event arising from relations between presences. It destabilizes anthropocentric sculptural logic and returns the site of thinking back to nature and matter themselves. Here, Shim Moonseup initiates a profound aesthetic shift toward an ontology in which meaning and form emerge from relational circumstance rather than authored certainty.

Thoughts on Clay

Thoughts on Clay, 1200x2400cm, 2010, Terracotta (Installation)
Thoughts on Clay, 28.5×28.5cm(4 pcs), 2002, Terracotta

Standing at another pivotal threshold, the artist returns to the most primordial material—earth—in Thoughts on Clay. Since antiquity, humanity has believed that we are born from clay and eventually return to clay. The earth was regarded as primal womb, as a site of perpetual circulation, and as a layered accumulation of time—strata. The artist visualizes this cyclical logic within Thoughts on Clay. Shim draws out the interior of terracotta so that sculpture is not the act of imposing form, but rather the revelation of matter’s autonomous interiority. The moment the artist ceases to “make,” nature begins its own work. The work underscores that the true sculptural force does not derive from fabrication, but from the process by which matter reveals itself and continues to transform beyond the artist’s intervention.

Wood Deity

Wood Deity, 190x234x30cm, 1989, Wood
Wood Deity, 220x25x154cm, 1991, Wood
Wood Deity, 240x224x120cm, 1992, Wood

Most of the materials used in Wood Deity were reclaimed from wooden structures demolished during the extensive reconstruction projects for the Olympic preparations in Korea (1988) and China (2008). The artist does not mechanically process the wood; he allows its inherent rhythm to speak, permitting nature (自然) itself to articulate. The title “Wood Deity” does not imply a spirit inhabiting wood, but declares that wood—as an ontological being—is already sacred in itself. The aesthetics that arise from the slow rhythm of natural materials—wood, iron, stone—constitute a fundamental question, and a radical resistance, against contemporary visual culture governed by velocity and image saturation.

Metaphor

Metaphor, 172x102x33cm, 1996, Wood, Steel
Wood Deity, 40x192x27cm, 1986, Wood

Metaphor records the sculptural encounter, tension, and reconciliation between wood as the product of nature and steel as the emblem of the artificial. By placing heterogeneous elements in collision and adjacency, the artist seeks the possibility of “communion” and “interpenetration” that may arise between them. The juxtaposition of wood and steel visualizes conflict and reconciliation, contradiction and harmony—conditions that inevitably emerge through the coexistence of nature and humanity, antiquity and modernity. The work is itself a metaphor for the current epoch of technological and ecological transition

The Presentation

The Presentation, 180x306x153cm, 2008, Steel, Stone, Electricity
The Presentation, 147x306x153cm, 2001, Stone, Optical fibers

The Presentation discloses the passage of existence from prima materia to prima energeia. Shim offers elemental substances—stone, metal, water, fire/light, and void—within which time, memory, and life-flow become perceptible. Here, matter cannot be subordinated to the finite aims of the human. It appears as an autonomous and enduring presence that emits its own condensed time and energy.

Re-present

Re-present, 230x202x65cm, 2025, Wood, Steel
Re-present, 245x262x150cm, 2010, Wood, Bamboo, Monitor

Composed of dead wood (timber) and living wood (bamboo), of physical bamboo and its digital counterpart, together with elements such as water and stone, Ruminations reconsiders the very act of sculpting through the overlapping strata of memory, temporality, and perception. It is not an act of repetition or reconstruction, but rather an embodiment of reincarnative awareness—a continual becoming in the present.

In this body of work, sculpture is not a fixed form but an exposure of relations in time, where multiple temporalities coexist. Shim Moonseup does not impose completion; he conducts the process, allowing the work to evolve through its own rhythm. The exhibited pieces are not static results but dynamic spatio-temporal fields, generating relations that emerge through the perception of the viewer and the fluidity of the surrounding environment.

The Presentation (Painting)

The Presentation, 290x130cm, 2024 Acrylic on Canvas
The Presentation, 582x224cm, 2022 Acrylic on Canvas
The Presentation, 112x162cm, 2015 Acrylic on Canvas

In the painted works of The Presentation, “the primordial blue lifted from the depths of the sea” meets “the white of desire that descends from the sky and shatters upon arrival,” producing a surface in perpetual swell. Shim describes this white as “a white that fractures and disperses like the blankness in East Asian painting.” Goethe once noted that “blue directs the mind toward the heavens through natural association.” Shim adds that blue possesses a deep affinity because it simultaneously holds the expanse of both the sky and the sea.

It is the blue that most immediately and universally comes to mind when we imagine sky and ocean. If “Klein Blue” may evoke strangeness and enigmatic rupture, Shim Moonseup’s blue is instead familiar—a deeply imprinted, easily operative color of everyday memory. Thus, the spectrum of blue and white perceived by each

viewer inevitably varies according to the specific time and space they have lived through. And this is not limited to blue alone. Every color functions differently depending on the world one has experienced.

Through these congenial and resonant colors, the artist imbues the surface with rhythm and vital breath, revealing the ceaseless interchange of becoming and dissolution. As he notes, the painted surface is not a plane upon which something is merely depicted; it is a generative site in which the world briefly dwells. Shim continues to research and experiment so that painting itself may speak, may imagine, and may make us feel. This generative space is also the place in which contemporary viewers—living in the present—are compelled to dwell.

Generative · Ecological Space

The Presentation, 800x200cm, 2024, Acrylic on Canvas
The Presentation, 160x160cm, 2025, Acrylic on Canvas
The Presentation, 117x80cm, 2024, Acrylic on Canvas

The exhibition title Nature Sculpts is not a rhetorical device but a sculptural declaration—an artistic response to the dual crisis of our time: the ascent of artificial intelligence and the planetary emergency of accelerating climate breakdown. We stand at a moment in which human authorship itself is challenged by machine cognition, while the Earth’s ecological system approaches cascading tipping points. Shim Moonseup confronts this threshold by posing a fundamental question: is the human the sole subject of art? Through this inquiry, he has overturned the dominant paradigms of sculpture.

His artistic philosophy resonates deeply with the thematic orientation of the 2026 Venice Biennale, In Minor Keys . Shim re-situates form not from the vantage of “center” but from the “periphery,” not from “progress” but from “slowness,” not from “will” but from “resonance.” His work recalibrates the relations between technology and nature, the human and the nonhuman, the subject and its environment—opening an ethical horizon for forms that emerge within

marginal senses and lesser-visible orders.

Shim’s aesthetic shift actively embraces the temporalities of becoming and flow, repetition and reincarnation, slowness and immersion. In this view, art is not a completed object but an event of resonance—occurring and dissolving within space-time. This sculptural sensibility aligns with East Asian philosophical thought—wu wei (無爲), emptiness (空), and responsive attunement (感應)—while offering a profound alternative to Western sculptural epistemologies.

In this exhibition, such philosophy expands into the entirety of the spatial field. The exhibition space is no longer a display container; it becomes a Generative Space, an Ecological Structure, and a Sensory Field in which nature itself operates as sculptural agent. The viewer is no longer a spectator evaluating form, but a participant within its resonance—co-creating the sculptural flow alongside nature.

Relation (Place), 300x148x135cm, 1973, Paper, Stone (2017 remake)

Relation (Place), 300x148x135cm, 1973, Paper, Stone (2017 remake, Details) The 8th

The 8th Paris Biennale, 1973, Paris, France

The 8th Paris Biennale, 1973, Paris, France

Opening Up, 50x65cm, 1976, Cloth, Sandpaper

Opening Up, 50x65cm, 1976, Cloth, Sandpaper

Opening Up, 50x65cm, 1976, (Detail)

The 9th Paris Biennial, 1975, Paris, France

Opening Up, 300x130cm, 1976, Cloth, Sandpaper

Guggenheim Museum, 2023, NewYork, USA

Yuan Art Museum, 2010, Beijing, China

Hammer Museum, 2024, Los Angeles, USA

The Presentation - From Earth, 480x35x480cm, 2009, Stone clay, Iron

Clayarch Gimhae Museum, Gimhae, Korea

Re-Present, 230x202x65cm, 2025

Re-Present, 230x202x65cm, 2025 (Detail)

Re-Present, 230x202x65cm, 2025 (Detail)

Re-Present, 236x210x90cm, 2010, Bamboo, Wood, Monitor

The Presentation, 315x147x175cm, 2001, Stone, Optical fibers

The Presentation, 315x147x175cm, 2001, Stone, Optical fibers (Detail)

The Presentation, 390x125x240cm, 2008, Steel, Stone, Electric Installation

The Presentation, 390x125x240cm, 2008, Steel, Stone, Electric Installation (Detail)

Wood Deity, 240x224x120cm, 1992, Wood

Wood Deity, 220x25x154cm, 1991, Wood

Wood Deity, 190x234x30cm, 1989, Wood

Wood Deity, 40x192x27cm, 1986, Wood

Metaphor, 172x102x33cm, 1996, Wood, Steel

The Presentation, 112x162cm, 2015, Acrylic on Canvas

The Presentation, 582x224cm, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas

The sea has always been a source of infinite possibility for me.

Through something on purpose

Relation (Circumstances),130x190x200cm, 1972, Canvas, Wood

Expression maybe something done on purpose.

I think of this when I have Shim Moon-seup’s works before my eyes. At a quick glance, his motifs and techniques are artful and plausible.

His works are there physically and logically as if they are necessary and the most natural in a certain situation or under the conditions of a certain time. Yet, a more serious look leads to the realization that everything in his works is so distorted that it makes spectators laugh. The artist did this deliberately: the works are mischievous, prankish. Maybe this artist is still playing naive tricks like the mischievous boy he once was. He might be paying the price of being a grown-up by playing those tricks in a sophisticated, metaphysical way. For example,he played with large pieces of paper, attaching them on the wall of a gallery, ripping the upper sides randomly, spread the ripped pieces on the floor of the gallery and placed several big and small rocks on them. He placed a huge canvas (size No. 100) on the wall and let several timbers slide upon the canvas, to scar the canvas. He also placed two large pieces of iron plate on the floor of the gallery, put several sacks of cement in the middle of the two iron plates, then pulled the plates apart slightly to distort this mountain of cement.

Everything in these works presents a delicate and stylish scene that is filled with a playful spirit. In this way, he was immersed in bringing about circumstantial situations: he used to present development of expressions of space. Since his visit to Paris, however, he started to take an interest in presenting circumstantial situations in terms of the time of actions. If an expression is something this artist does on purpose, it is no wonder that those expressions collide with nature.

The characteristics of this concept of collision are most apparent in terms of time, rather than in terms of space. Time is subject that slips by, but the artist is trying to advance time and to realize it into a pseudo-reality, in a bid to taste a reality that is infinitely open through distorted expression.

Shim would do this by, for example, tightly tying sacks or canvases on a frame and scratching the cloth of the frame with sandpaper or files to make it look old and wornout through friction. I haven’t seen this myself, but I’ve been told by the artist that he took large iron plates, crushed them, attached them on several frames and intentionally scratched

Relation (Place), 1973 (2017 remake) 300x148x135cm, Paper, Stone

the corners or edges with grinders as if they were worn out through long-term erosion.
Of course, his works are not all about abrasion: there are works where he developed methods for expressing space and time through creases. He mixed powdered marble and polyester to make a cylinder or tetrahedron, crushed or distorted the shapes in the course of solidification and then tried to straighten them out to restore them to the original state. As a result, the object comes to take a strange shape that is distorted in every way, crushed absurdly and solidified, and this becomes a striking reality that has no name.
Shim Moon-seup attempts to present situations in advance that occur in ordinary situations both in space and time without effort. Yet, we can not deny that these presentations circumstance, which appears to be natural at first glance, are actually a state where something is wrong and nonsensical, caused by a mischievous act that should not have occurred. Despite, or because of this nonsensical act, we come to understand an expression of the universe, where everything is properly presented, and it is quite interesting. Here we have this scene, which is
like something that happens in the world yet is somehow distorted and nonsensical, and this might be where there are all the meanings and characters of the actions that were conducted on purpose. There is a natural, intact sense of reality, which we cannot yet sense in our everyday lives, presented by the paradoxical and purposeful tricks of the artist.
There is a story about Sen no Rikyu, a celebrated Japanese tea master in the distant past. On an autumn day, he swept every fallen leaf from below a tree and spread a few of these fallen leaves below the same tree on purpose and enjoyed tea there. Maybe this is part of true creativity or expression. Sen no Rikyu put artificiality into nature, and, by doing so, made nature more natural and enjoyed it in a more human way. Expression is something we do on purpose. Yet, it is of course a beautiful and wise mimicry, in order to meet a greater world, not a willful imitation of the nature. It is acute mischief against nature and a very human form of expression. If expression is done only through the mechanism of force of habit or blunt techniques, it becomes a slave of an institution of style and pattern, and ends up being a disguise of the ‘contemporary art’ of the time.
Shim Moon-seup always takes pride in being an ordinary person who lives his life on the horizon of daily lives. His works are evidence of his desire to avoid highbrow art from other countries. What he wants is to discover the vivid universe from the myriad scenes hidden in everyday lives. Spectators get to stop and break into smiles because the artist presents distorted shapes and scenes on purpose, as if they were
supposed to be like that anyway, and as if there was nothing strange in that distortion. From an indifferent expression of things that are absurd and worthless, the artist finds a great perspective, and his artworks are his actions of absurdity, and spectators cannot help but smile. I heartily hope that this viewpoint of discovery, and this playful nature can lead to a world that is always fresh and ever craftier in its self-expression.
Relation(Place), 40x800x40cm, 1971, Wood

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