Moonlight Crown_Year of the Snake, 2025
Yeesookyung
1 3/4 × 4 × 4 3/8 inches
MASSIMODECARLO is pleased to unveil Moonlight Crown_Year of the Snake (2025), a limited-edition sculpture from Yeesookyung’s renowned Moonlight Crown series. Created using resin and 3D printing, and finished with 24K gold leaf, this work honors the Year of the Snake in the Asian zodiac.
“For a long time, I thought of crowns as substitutes for the haloes depicted over the heads of Buddha, Jesus, and other saints,” Yeesookyung explains. But her crowns challenge tradition. They are no longer lightweight symbols of untouchable power but monumental, body-like forms. Heavy and intricate, they shift the meaning of glory into something tangible, imperfect, and deeply human.
“Questioning the meaning of a lustrous crown—a symbol of absolute power, opulence, and glory—Yeesookyung creates crowns that have transformed into body-like forms, too large and heavy to be worn on the head. Adorned with an array of shiny, ornamental materials such as crystal, glass, and mirrors, they are intertwined with tiny sculptures of angels, girls' faces, praying hands, limbs, plants, and animals, all recurring motifs from the artist’s Daily Drawing and Flame series. Radiating an exaggerated energy with their maximalist aesthetic, these crowns are so resplendent they verge on grotesque, embodying a duality between desire and despair, fascination and horror. By inventing new mystical feminine figures inspired by Korean folklore, Yeesookyung imbues the works with complex identities and dualities.”
The Artist
Yeesookyung was born in 1963, and currently lives and works in Seoul, Korea. Working across video, installation, sculpture, drawing, the interdisciplinary artist emerged on the art scene in the 1990s, as part of a wave of young Korean artists experimenting with a wide range of mediums to express personal experiences in a rapidly modernizing Korea.
Best known for her acclaimed Translated Vase series, the project began with the remnants of disposed vases by a master Korean potter. The artist took the fragments of broken ceramic shards, seaming them together with epoxy and later hand-painting them with 24-carat gold leaf, resulting in simultaneously voluptuous yet fragile forms. Yeesookyung’s amalgamation of Korean historical canon with elements of Western modernity is entirely idiosyncratic. Through this cycle of destruction and re-creation within each crevice of every porcelain fragment, Yeesookyung embeds the collective identity of Korean history and culture, re-interpreting the final piece for a wider western audience.