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Art Professor and Chair Young Min Moon Receives Chancellor's Medal

May 1, 2023 Academics

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Young Min Moon
Young Min Moon

Young Min Moon, professor in the Department of Art, recently delivered the talk “The Aftereffects of War in Contemporary Korean Art,” as part of the UMass Amherst 2022-23 Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series. As part of the lecture—held Wednesday, April 12, in Old Chapel—Moon was also presented with the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest recognition bestowed upon faculty by the campus. 

For his talk, Moon discussed how the Korean Peninsula has seen a succession of violent ruptures over the past century, and that it remains a flashpoint for the world’s superpowers . The peninsula is still gripped by Cold War geopolitics, long after the fall of the Communist bloc. In the aftermath of the Korean War, South Korea was built on androcentric nation building, anti-communism, and a relentless drive for industrialization. In the period of compressed development from the poverty-stricken 1950s to the global success of today, countless lives have been lost to the state apparatus—lives whose memories must be contextualized in the history and politics of the Cold War.

Moon is a visual artist, critic, curator, and art historian whose work reflects his migration across cultures and his awareness of the hybrid nature of identities forged amid the complex historical and political relationships between Asia and North America. Moon published his essays on contemporary Korean art in a wide range of publications, including Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader (MIT), A Companion to Korean Art (Wiley), and exhibition catalogues and anthologies published by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Art, and journals The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Rethinking Marxism, and Trans Asia Photography. He is an editor for the online peer review journal Trans Asia Photography. He curated the traveling exhibition, “Incongruent: Contemporary Art from South Korea,” with an accompanying bilingual Korean and English publication.

Moon has shown his art in many exhibitions in South Korea and North America, including Incheon Art Platform, Sansumunhwa, Art Space Pool, Kumho Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Art, Kukje Gallery, Mugaksa Temple, Smith College Museum of Art, and the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, among others. In recent years he has been painting the motif of the offerings and prostrations for the dead in the Confucian ritual, Jesa. Chair of the Department of Art at University of Massachusetts Amherst, Moon is a recipient of Guggenheim Fellowship and Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant.

Find all the Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 Lectures on the Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series website. 

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