"Place" and "presence" were two of the core concerns of Minimalism, the last thread of Modernism before it collapsed into Postmodernism's stylistic confusion in the 1970s.
Yet those two fundamental ideas are oddly inapplicable to Seung Keun Moon and Tadashi Yagi, both of whom died tragically young: Moon at age 34 in 1982 from gallbladder cancer and Yagi at age 26 in 1983 from leukemia. Both artists have had little or no presence since their deaths, so it is natural to wonder what their place is in the Japanese art world.
Coming just after the Mono-ha Movement (School of Things) that dominated Japan from 1968 to the early '70s, Moon's paintings address some of the same visual ideas as the movement's principal theorist and painter, Lee U-Fan, and Yagi pays a Mono-ha-like attention to the purity of materials.
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