"There Is Poetry in a Poet's Face"... 48-Year Design Veteran Moon Cheol Paints 22 Sentences

Former Hongik University College of Fine Arts Dean Moon Cheol began his portrait series after attending a poetry recital
From the "instant" of a rose to the inner world of the face... A long dialogue between poetry and painting
Surreal drawing collaboration with poet Kim Hyeju last year... Now 22 oil-painted portraits
November 3-9 at Yemoon Gallery in Seoul's Jung-gu... Portraits of poets exhibited alongside their representative poems

Poetry is written on paper, but a poet's life also remains on their face: the gaze of someone who has spent a long time thinking, the expression of someone accustomed to silence rather than speaking, and traces left by laughter and sorrow. Painter Moon Cheol rediscovered this one day when he attended a poetry recital. Poems heard in the poets' own voices were different from the words he had read on the page. He decided to convey that resonance through painting, seeking traces left by language in their faces.

Poster for Moon Cheol's solo exhibition, "Poets, Sentences on Their Faces," opening at Yemoon Gallery at the Jung-gu Cultural Center in Seoul from November 3 to 9. Moon, a former dean of the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University, presents oil portraits of 22 poets alongside one of each poet's signature poems. Jung-gu Cultural Center

Moon Cheol, an emeritus professor who served as dean of Hongik University's College of Fine Arts, will hold a solo exhibition featuring portraits of 22 poets, titled "Poets: Sentences on Their Faces," at Yemoon Gallery, Jung-gu Cultural Center, in Seoul from November 3 to 9. The exhibition places portraits of the poets alongside their representative poems, inviting visitors to read each person's face and the words they have written together.

The starting point was a poetry recital he happened to attend. Deeply impressed by the vitality of language delivered in the poets' own voices, Moon Cheol set aside his existing work for a while and devoted himself to portraiture. This time, he did not paint imaginary figures. He portrayed 22 poets who had each cultivated their own literary worlds, using traditional oil-painting techniques.

Interestingly, he was not a painter who had focused on portraiture from the outset. After studying visual design at Hongik University's Department of Visual Design and at the Pratt Institute in the United States, Moon Cheol served as a professor at Hongik University and as dean of its College of Fine Arts. For more than 40 years, he worked in visual design, engaging with a range of visual languages, including advertising, posters, corporate identity (CI), book covers, and illustration.

More than 200 works were presented at "Moon Cheol: 48 Years of Visual Design and Now (1976-2025)," held at the Seoul Arts Center in 2025, ranging from his first design project during his time at Seoul Arts High School to works created after his retirement. It was a long period spent considering what to show people and how to show it.

He began to focus in earnest on fine art after retiring. For his 2023 solo exhibition "The Moment," he painted roses. It captured the moment when a flower, having bloomed fully and just before wilting, stood at the intersection of its most beautiful state and the first signs of its disappearance. At the time, he said he wanted to capture an "instant" that already existed in reality but was difficult to see. Through fully bloomed roses, he sought to ask when life reaches its most radiant moment.

The painter who had depicted flowers later turned his attention to people's faces. His "B flat" project with poet Kim Hyeju last year was an important link. Kim Hyeju's second poetry collection, "B flat," included 30 pencil drawings by Moon Cheol. The work took faces as its subject but did not simply reproduce their visible forms; instead, it expressed emotions and symbolism through surreal images combining dots, lines, and planes.

While Kim Hyeju's poetry and Moon Cheol's paintings came together in one book, this time the poets' faces and poems meet in one exhibition space. This is a step beyond treating poetry and painting merely as illustrations or commentary that explain one another.

A face does not tell us everything about a person. The same is true of a portrait. No matter how precisely it is painted to resemble its subject, it cannot fully capture the time that person has lived or their inner world. That gap is precisely what Moon Cheol has focused on in this exhibition.

Rather than simply reproducing appearances realistically, the artist sought to express through facial expressions and gazes the emotions and thoughts embedded between the lines of poetic language. After reading someone's poem and then looking at their face again, viewers may perceive what they had not noticed before; after gazing at the face for a long time and then reading the poem, they may experience the texture of its words differently.

"Painting a poet's face was a process of discerning the inner world beyond their expression and the trajectory of life etched into their poetry," Moon Cheol said. He added, "I hope the paintings and poems will deepen one another, allowing visitors to feel as though they are standing at a poetry recital where the poet's voice resonates."

The question posed by the artist is also this: not how accurately a painting explains a poem, but how the words change when we come to know the face of the person who wrote it.

The exhibition will run from November 3 to 9 at Yemoon Gallery, on the first floor of the Hanwha Building at 1 Cheonggyecheon-ro, Jung-gu, Seoul. It is free and open daily from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.