Glittering and Fleeting : Seo-hyeon Moon and Xu Zichun 

Alpha Contemporary is proud to present 「Glittering and Fleeting : Seo-hyeon Moon, Xu Zichun」from April 5 to April 19, 2025.​

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The German writer Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) has left the following words in his prose work “On Butterflies,” which describes his passionate relationship with butterflies, symbols of the beautiful and the perishable.

"Everything we see is expression, all of nature an image, a language and vibrant hieroglyphic script.

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A butterfly is something special, an insect not like any other, and not really an insect at all, but the final, greatest, most festive and vitally important stage of its existence.

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A butterfly does not live to eat and grow old; its sole purpose is to make love and multiply. To that end, it is clad in magnificent finery.

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Because the butterfly is a festive lover and stunning shape-shifter, it has come to symbolize both impermanence and eternal persistence; from time immemorial, humans have embraced the butterfly as an allegorical and heraldic figure of the soul.."
(Hermann Hesse, from On Butterflies)

It seems that nothing has been written about butterflies so sensitively, so fascinatingly, and so clearly. And so, in this statement, we quote Hesse's text verbatim.

This exhibition is titled “Glittering and Fleeting” and features works of Seo-hyeon Moon (Korean b.1982), who created Chogakubo, using butterflies as a motif, and Xu Zichun (Chinese b.1997) who are presented by oil paintings with a message that matter is adjusted to neutrality through various inflections.

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Seo-hyeon Moon creates contemporary patchworks in her unique style while making full use of traditional techniques of Chogakbo, Korean traditional patchwork. She uses recycling scraps of silk from Hanbok, Kimono and other items for her works.

She presents her works that are closer to painting, based on the abstract patterns, compositional beauty, and sophisticated color arrangement seen in the traditional Chogakbo.

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You can see this in her butterfly series especially which depicts abstract patterns while expressing figurative expressions.​

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Moon works through the labor-intensive process of hand-sewing, accumulating time with each stitch

Each hand-sewn piece is a glorious inspiration of the sensibilities, feelings, and experiences that have been inherent in her life.

In the Butterfly series, the graceful shapes, the beauty of the multicolored wings are composed of a collection of various senses and diverse shards of light that are subdivided by fine stitches. Each pattern of butterfly wings can be experienced as a rhyme of delicate sensibility and the artist's own narrative, along with the unique beauty of the composition.

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Her butterflies, which seem to be fluttering gracefully at any moment, express the secret of their existence in a sophisticated visual language of life's brilliance and fragility.

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Graduated from Kyungwon University, Department of Textile Art, in 2005. Held a solo exhibition at Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul Arts Center in 2023 (selected by the New Artist Contest Program), selected for the 2021 Kimyo 2021 Opencall solo exhibition contest and selected as a Young Korean Artist at the 2021 CICA Museum of Art, participated in a group exhibition at Alpha Contemporary, Tokyo (2024), and has been active in Korea and abroad.

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Xu Zichun (Chinese, b.1997) who is from Yunnan Province surrounded by mountains located in the heart of mainland China, depicts the mountainous landscape of his native Yunnan.
 

Xu, who draws inspiration for his work from music and memory, is a man who lives in memory. Returning to past experiences and emotions and observing their impact on himself is the foundation and impetus for his work. Memory is an organic entity that sustains Xu's psyche, “metabolizing” with the passage of time, changing form, but still living inside of him.

By depicting abstract memory in figurative form and reconstructing it as a work of art, the artist's own existence is brought to light, and an exploration of the relationship between “memory” and “I” is begun.

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At the center of his expression is the worldview of how memory forms the personality of “I,” and how forgetting can take on new forms and continue to exist in other dimensions. By projecting the forms and emotions born from the metabolism of memory, Xu continues his journey of self-reflection and facing the self even more deeply.

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In Xu's work, the flow of time is captured from the flow of the musical scale. Like a musical scale that repeats highs and lows and then adjusts to “natural” (♮), the mountains and horizon of Yunnan Province are used as a metaphor to express the fact that matter goes through various inflections and then adjusts to neutrality. 

 

This can also be read from the “butterfly” as a metaphor for life.

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■𝗘𝘅𝗵𝗶𝗯𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗢𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄

・Duration｜Mar 8 - Mar 22 2025

・Operation Hour ｜ Tue.-Sat. 12:00 - 18:00, Tue : Appointment only by 6 pm t

・Venue｜Alpha Contemporary

・Admission｜Free

・Inquiry｜infoalphacontemporary@gmail.com

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■Artist Talk

・Date｜4- 6 pm Mar 15 2025

・Anyone can join us without RSVP

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