SEPTEMBER 2025 / SCULPTURAL POETRY, HOON MOREAU
In September 2023, Architectural Digest magazine published a lengthy cover story about an interior design project by AD100 designer Jake Arnold for Emmy, Oscar, Grammy, and Tony Award-winning artist John Legend and his wife, model, and TV personality Chrissy Tiegen. The article featured an image of their glamorous and moody piano bar, adorned with a pair of bulbous Enchantée tables in bronze, signed by French-Korean designer Hoon Moreau . (The international edition aimed at audiences outside the U.S., where celebrities are less well known, featured the table on the cover.) Arnold bought them from a French gallery, OAK Oneofakind , run by a dynamic and enterprising French design dealer, Antoine Vignault.
“The Enchantée series launched in 2016 and was an immediate success,” says Vignault, sitting in her gallery in Toulouse, “but the story of AD has propelled the creator and her work into the spotlight like never before.” The Enchanted Wooden Twin Tables are now sold out; the last pair was sold to the famous interior designer Julie Hillman in New York. There are still a few pieces from the following series, Enchanted Ellipse and The Enchanted Twins in bronze.
Vignault met Moreau in 2019 during his participation in the PAD Paris Design Fair. “I was amazed by his sculptural creations that effortlessly merge art, design and nature to create harmonious and immersive forms,” he explains. “From freestanding sculptures to functional objects like furniture and lighting, her designs are guided by a deep respect for natural materials – wood, bronze, stone, crystal – and inspired by the shapes found in nature.”
Moreau’s creations transcend, even question, utility, like many contemporary collector’s furniture. But more than that, they seem to invite the viewer to touch, observe, and to what Vignault poetically describes as a “connection” with forms—both sensorially and emotionally, a quality he attributes in part to his bicultural heritage, in part to his love of materials, and his singular spiritual sensibility and calling.
Korean minimalism and French decorative arts merge in Moreau’s sculptures, but in a way that makes them unrecognizable. Her creations exude both tension and fluidity, a dialogue between the outer space, the human body, culture and the universe. The result is a contemplative object that integrates thought and aesthetics.
On the material level, this tension manifests itself in a series of visual contrasts: between light and shadow, balance and tension, a feeling of weightlessness and heaviness, between permanence and transformation. The artist enters a creative state guided by intuition and faith as she works, she explains, speaking of her processes in a language nourished in part by books on spiritualism, astronomy, and the origins of the galaxy, including the work of Canadian astrophysicist Hubert Reeves.
“I sculpt the landscape of the universe,” Moreau explains. “Through my work, I embark on a fascinating journey, in search of who we are. Melting into the darkness of the universe, I contemplate the breathtaking landscape offered by the Earth, the planets and the stars. I fill my body with all their energy, hoping that the echo of this vast universe will manifest itself in my works. The movement of my wrist, as if it were that of my whole body, draws me into a four-dimensional space. »
Everything is made in Moreau’s workshop in Épernon, a small rural town in the Loire Valley. Sketches and drawings are hung on the walls and stacked on the tables, more like the residue of an initial inspiration than as a fixed idea or a guide. He sometimes shapes clay models, but these simply serve as landmarks. She most often works alone, often on several pieces simultaneously. His work includes both functional and sculptural furniture and lighting, as well as wall sculptures and drawings.
Moreau found success through his collaboration with Vignault, who sold his work, through his gallery and Incollect, to leading interior designers such as Jake Arnold, Julie Hillman, Jacques Grange, and Serge Castella. His works are part of the collections of the Cernuschi Museum in Paris and the Posco Art Museum in Seoul.
