Ebb Tide

Seong Moy

Moy's work, even using color woodcut, used a combination of abstracted Surrealism and gestural Abstract Expressionism. Though abstract in its composition, Moy drew on the calligraphic imagery of the Chinese language and references to the natural world.

"Ebb Tide" a large (30 x 23") color woodcut was done in 1965, this impression being numbered "A/P 11/19". This proof is from a printing campaign of 19 impressions, apart from the published of edition 50, printed in 1978. Moy allows the imagery of a tide pool and beach, with birds and debris seeming to emerge from what initially appears to be a balanced abstract composition.

Seong Moy was born in Canton, China on April 12, 1921 but he immigrated to the United States in 1931, settling with his family in St. Paul, Minnesota. Moy began his art studies as a teenager at the WPA Federal Art Project. He continued his art education at the St. Paul School of Art under Cameron Booth, and the WPA Graphic Workshop at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN.

In 1941, he was awarded a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York where he studied with Vaclav Vytlacil and that same year he studied at the Hofmann School with Hans Hofmann. Later in 1941, Moy enlisted in the Air Force and put his art education on hold. He served in the 14th Air Force, the "Flying Tigers," in the China-India-Burma Theater where he worked as an aerial reconnaissance photographer in China and Southeast Asia.

Although Moy was primarily a painter during the post-wars years, he began making prints when he received a fellowship to work at Stanley William Hayter's graphic art workshop, Atelier 17, which had moved to New York in 1940 after its founding in Paris in 1927. The workshop was a center for the development of experimental techniques and changing attitudes towards printmaking. Moy began his teaching career in 1951 with painting classes at the University of Minnesota. Over the years he taught part time at various universities and colleges, including Smith College, Vassar College, Cooper Union, the Pratt Graphic Center and the Art Students League. Following the lead of Hans Hofmann, Moy opened his own summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1954 and taught painting, drawing and printmaking for twenty years. He returned to a newly developing China in 2008, at the age of 85, accompanying his wife, daughters and grandchildren to the rural villages where he and his wife were born in the 1920s. Seong Moy died in New York City on June 9, 2013.