Sun Hee Moon is an artist of Korean origin who, for this exhibition, constructs a pictorial journey based on a subject that is as simple as it is rich in meaning: the hand. Not just any hand, but the hand that speaks. The exhibition project “Gestures: What a Gesture Tells Us” comes from an observation that goes across distant cultures and geographies: the gesture as an autonomous form of language, capable of expressing what the voice sometimes cannot—or cannot fully express. Sun Hee Moon pays close attention both to Italian gestures—those theatrical, everyday, almost choreographic movements that accompany and amplify speech—and to sign language, a fully developed system of communication in which every hand movement is syntax, meaning, and a voice for those who have none. The clasped hands that populate her canvases are thus fragments of a universal yet intimate alphabet: hands that intertwine, open, and clasp in gestures of listening or waiting. For example, in works such as “The Dumb Speech—a title that is itself a manifesto—the artist brings together sign language, involuntary gestures, and social relationships on a single pictorial surface, where silence is not the absence of communication but its densest and most concentrated form. It is in this tension between what is said and what is shown that we recognize the most authentic essence of Sun Hee Moon’s work: an artist capable of bringing together global cultural roots and local experience, without one prevailing over the other. Her hands speak a universal language, but they do so through bodies, surfaces, and colors that still carry the marks of a specific origin. It is no coincidence that, alongside the theme of gestural expression, the exhibition brings to the fore another central thread in the artist’s work: the memory of Korea, evoked through the traditional costumes and customs of Korean women—figures whose silent presences permeate the canvas like echoes of a domestic and dreamlike world.
It is precisely within this dual tension—between the universality of gesture and the particularity of tradition and figurative art, between communication that connects and identity that distinguishes—that Sun Hee Moon’s painting finds its place: specifically, an invitation to slow down and reflect on what hands, even before words, have always been able to communicate. The exhibition will be open to the public through October 31, 2026.
Sun Hee Moon was born in Seoul (South Korea) and later moved to Brazil. Between 1980 and 1990, she began her studies and deepened her knowledge of drawing techniques, perspective, and art history in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In 1995, she obtained a degree in Architecture and Urban Planning from Mackenzie University in São Paulo (Brazil). She moved to Italy in 1998, where she further developed her artistic training, which she had always cultivated and studied alongside her architectural studies. She is a visual artist and contemporary painter.
