Becky Moon

Becky Moon (born 2002) is a New York-based painter who pictures the structure of the mind through arrangements of ordinary objects. In her acrylic paintings, branches, stones, and snail shells, each standing for a thought or a belief, are stacked into structures that explore tangibility, mass, and gravity. Her recent paintings, informed by neuroscience, natural history, and the philosophy of perception, turn to consciousness in other forms of life, from early plants to animals moving from water to land.

Moon was born in Seoul and is of North and South Korean heritage. Her grandparents’ accounts of leaving North Korea to escape war led her to ask what remains when physical things are lost; she concluded that the mind, passed down through love and family, cannot be taken away, and set out to paint it. Each object is built from hundreds of small brushstrokes, a slow process she describes as a form of reverence. As a student she began translating philosophical texts into images, working with philosophers including Susanna Siegel of Harvard University.