by Benjamin Genocchio 

All pieces shown, plus more from Hoon Moreau, are available from OAK Oneofakind Gallery on Incollect.com



In September 2023, Architectural Digest magazine published an expansive cover story on an interior design project by AD100 designer Jake Arnold for Emmy, Oscar, Grammy, and Tony award-winning entertainer John Legend and his wife, model and television personality Chrissy Tiegen. In the article was an image of their glamorous and moody piano bar, featuring a pair of bulbous bronze Enchantée tables by the Korean-French designer Hoon Moreau. (The global edition for the audience outside the United States, where the celebrities are less well known, featured the table on the cover.) Arnold sourced them from a French gallery called OAK Oneofakind, run by a dynamic and enterprising French design dealer named Antoine Vignault.



Left: Les Enchantées Jumelles (The Enchanted Twins), bronze, 2016. From a series of side tables designed with organic forms, as if emerging from the ground or from a magical dream. In sculpted patinated bronze with gradient intensities of tone from gilded to black bronze. Signed and numbered, limited edition of 8 + 4 AP. Right: Hoon Moreau. All photos courtesy Hoon Moreau/OAK Oneofakind. 



“The Enchantée series was launched in 2016 and it was immediately popular,” Vignault says, sitting in his Toulouse gallery, “but the AD story catapulted the designer and her work into the limelight like never before.” The Enchantée wood twin tables are now sold out; the last pair was sold to top interior designer Julie Hillman in New York. A few pieces are still available from the subsequent Enchantée Ellipse and Les Enchantées Jumelles bronze table series.


Vignault met Moreau in 2019 during participation at the PAD Paris Design Fair. “I was amazed by her sculptural creations that effortlessly merge art, design, and nature into harmonious, immersive forms,” he says. “Whether freestanding sculptures or functional objects like furniture and lighting, her creations are guided by a real respect for natural materials — wood, bronze, stone, crystal — and inspired by shapes found in the natural world.”



Left: Hoon Moreau hand-sculpting the crack in the bronze Les Enchantées Jumelles table. Right: Hoon Moreau with OAK Oneofakind Gallery founder and director Antoine Vignault.


Left: Moreau’s sketches for Les Enchantées Jumelles, bois, her sold-out edition of the tables in oak, the tops tinted in Chinese ink with a gilded crack. Right: Top view, showing the exquisite patina of Les Enchantées Jumelles. The crack gleams in textured gilt bronze. 



Moreau’s designs transcend and even challenge utility, like much of contemporary collectible furniture. But more than that, they seem to invite the viewer to touch, to observe and what Vignault poetically described as “connect” with the forms — both on a sensory and an emotional level, a quality he ascribes partly to her bicultural heritage and partly to her love of materials and uniquely expressed spiritual purpose and sensibility.


Korean Minimalism and French decorative arts meld together in Moreau’s sculptures, but in a way that renders both of them unrecognizable. There is a sense of both tension and fluidity in her designs, with a dialogue between external space, the human body, culture, and the universe. The result is a contemplative object that integrates thought with aesthetics.



La Griffe du Temps I (The Claw of Time I), 2017. Moreau’s ode to the cycle of life. Cabinet in solid oak tinted with Chinese ink in varying intensities to give a sense of movement and depth, with a combed texture. Two carved cracks in gold leaf, cabinet pull and base in solid cast patinated bronze, with base partially covered in carved and tinted oak. Cabinet interior is in black pin oak sourced from a peat bog where it was submerged for centuries, giving it an intensely saturated black hue. The interior drawers are gilded in gold leaf. A unique piece, edition of one, signed. 



On a material level, this tension is manifested in a series of visual contrasts: between light and shadow, balance and stress, a feeling of weightlessness and heaviness, and between permanence and transformation. The artist enters a creative state guided by intuition and faith when working, she explains, speaking about her processes in a language informed in part by books about spiritualism, astronomy, and the origins of the galaxy, especially the work of the Canadian astrophysicist Hubert Reeves.


“I am sculpting the landscape of the universe,” Moreau says. “Through my work, I embark on a fascinating journey, one 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 manifests itself in my works. The movement of my wrist, as if it were that of my whole body, leads me on and into a four-dimensional space.”



Top three images, clockwise from top left: 1. Hoon Moreau in her studio, fabricating Lianes Lumineuses vine-like 8-foot-tall lamps 2. Lianes Lumineuses (Luminous Vines) Lamps, 2017. Set of 3, also available individually. Gradient Chinese ink-tinted oak with gilded illuminated gold leaf cracks. Signed and numbered, limited edition of 8 + 4 AP. OAK Gallery owner Antoine Vignault remarked that the set of three is a perfect “screen” to define spaces. 3. In-process image of Lianes Lumineuses. Hoon’s intricate designs are labor-intensive.

Bottom four images, clockwise from top left: 1. Les Poufs Culottes, 2020. Pair of “cheeky” stools in solid oak tinted with Chinese ink and natural boxwood. Signed and numbered, limited edition of 8 + 4 AP. 2. Enchantée Ellipse wood side table, 2017. Table in solid oak, base sculpted and tinted in shades from black to natural oak. Elliptical-shaped top with contoured edge and carved crack. Signed and numbered, limited edition of 8 + 4 AP. A patinated bronze version is also available. 3. Signed and numbered Enchantée Ellipse wood side table. 4. Hoon fabricating Les Poufs Culottes. 



“This collection plays on the opposition between the softness of the curves and the roughness of the reliefs which are reminiscent of the natural lines that we sometimes find at the seaside, offering magnificent pebbles polished by the rolling of the water at the foot of steep cliffs, as if sculpted.”

— Hoon Moreau


Left: Dolomite II, 2018. Slipper chair in carved solid oak, gradient-tinted with Chinese ink, gouge-carved top detail. Carved crack with gold leaf. Signed and numbered, limited edition of 8 + 4 AP. No 1/8 Top right: Dolomite III, 2018. Slipper chair in carved solid oak, stained to an intense black with Indian ink. Upper back carved in an organic rock pattern with carved crack in gold leaf running from front to back. Signed and numbered, limited edition of 8 + 4 AP. No 1/8  Bottom right: Dolomite IV, 2018. Slipper chair in carved solid oak stained to an intense black with Indian ink. Individually knotted neoprene cord cushion encircled by carved gold leaf border. Signed and numbered, limited edition of 3.



Everything is made in Moreau’s studio in Épernon, a small rural town in the Val-de-Loire. Sketches and drawings are hung on the walls and piled on tables, more as the residue of an initial inspiration than a fixed idea or a guide. Sometimes she shapes clay models, but they serve simply as reference points. She works mostly in solitude, often on multiple pieces concurrently. Her oeuvre includes furniture and lighting that is both functional and sculptural, and wall sculptures and drawings.


Moreau has enjoyed success following her collaboration with Vignault, who has sold her works both through his gallery and Incollect to prominent interior designers including Jake Arnold, Julie Hillman, Jacques Grange, and Serge Castella. Her works are included in the collections of the Musée Cernuschi in Paris and the Posco Art Museum in Seoul.




Above and Left: Métaphysique 2020 B, 2020. Office desk in carved solid oak, gradient-tinted with Chinese ink. Four drawers with brass pulls. A unique piece, edition of 1, signed. Right: Métaphysique de la Lumière, 2019. LED illuminated wall sculpture in bronze and sculpted oak tinted with Chinese ink. Available in 3 sizes. A unique piece, made to order. 


“In Métaphysique de la Lumière, the central piece of wood represents the clustered buildings of a city, or figures huddled together. The light gently emanating from the bronze structure symbolizes the complementarity of the universe, a circle in which the complexity of the human world is inscribed. This envelope forms a whole with irregularities that nevertheless appear perfect.”

— Hoon Moreau


Roche en Équilibre (Rock in Balance), 2017. Coffee table in sculpted solid oak. Top tinted with Chinese ink, two sculpted hollows gilded with gold dust. Base sculpted and tinted in nuances from black to natural oak. Signed and numbered.



Moreau was born in Seoul in 1967 and graduated from Seoul National University’s Department of Fine Arts in 1991 with a specialization in sculpture. In 1996, Moreau enrolled in a master’s program at the École Camondo, a school for architecture and interior design in Paris. She embarked on a career in interior design and for the next two decades worked as a project team leader on architectural and interior design schemes for art museums, palaces, hotels, and private residences. But she never gave up her dream of dedicating herself to artistic furniture design. “She sketched in her notebooks what would later come to life through her skilled hands as sculptures and works of art,” Vignault says.


Her earliest furniture sculptures include the Enchantée tables featured in the AD cover story, were initially carved out of oak wood and later cast in bronze, with natural colors and finishes ranging from gold to black. The design is organic, in a mushroom-like shape with a single or double stem, and a sinuous crack at one edge of the polished top to simulate split wood. “You enter my world as if into a forest or an enchanted tale,” she says about her aesthetic inspiration. “The organic forms I compose and recompose are carved and dictated by the magic of nature.”




Left: Space Time 7, 2025. Pencil drawing on paper with embedded piece of coal. Framed under glass. Right: Space Time 9, 2025. Pencil drawing on paper with embedded piece of coal. Framed under glass. 



Perhaps her most spectacular series to date is the La Griffe Du Temps collection. There are three pieces in this collection: a console/cabinet, a tall cabinet and a tall chest with five drawers arranged on three sides, all handcrafted in a material palette of solid oak and bronze. The interiors are made of a rare black oak from the Marais, “a wood that has been submerged for thousands of years in peat bogs, giving an intense and unique black color,” the artist explains. The exterior wood is textured as if combed, and tinted with Chinese ink to give the grooves a sense of movement and depth. Sculpted and gilded oak or bronze “roots” wrap, climb or are embedded in the piece, serving as hardware. Interior drawers are patinated in gold leaf to give a secretly luxurious feel. Moreau describes La Griffe Du Temps (The Claw of Time): “We feel here the cycle of life, as when time does its work and it lets us glimpse the precious heart of matter. You can see the eye of time, the wood that splits or the movement of the roots that we find when man lets nature and life do what it will.”


The rhythms of nature are merged with human experience in everything Moreau creates. The Dolomites sculptural seating collection has several slipper chair designs in hand-hewn carved solid oak tinted with Chinese ink, embellished with delicate accent lines in gold leaf. In this chair series the artist, Vignault explains, “plays on the contrast between the softness of the curves and the roughness of the reliefs that remind us of the rough natural lines that are found on cliffs at the seaside in proximity to magnificent rocks polished round by the rolling of the water, as if sculpted.”



Le Lac Ellipse (The Elliptical Lake), 2017. Aged mirror with carved oak frame tinted with Chinese ink. Carved oak detail with gold leaf. Signed and numbered, limited edition of 8 + 4 AP.


Memory of the Future, T4, T5, 2025. Wall sculpture diptych in carved oak, India ink, and gold leaf. Signed, unique piece.



Dolomite III perfectly captures this duality. The front of the chair recalls a perfectly smooth pebble eroded by water, and the back of the chair is gouge-carved in places to imitate natural weathering and erosion over time, with a gold leaf slit “sneaking between the rocks.” Dolomite IV, a slipper chair of carved solid oak, gold leaf, and neoprene is the most radical in the series. A “cushion” of neoprene foam strings is knotted and sewn individually onto a seat of the same material embedded in the wooden form. The cushion section is outlined with a meandering outline of gold leaf, and the contrasting textures create a strikingly animated effect.


Admirers of Moreau’s art have a special affection for her Metaphysical Desk, a one-of-a-kind edition with four drawers made of brass and solid oak, carved by hand and stained with her signature Chinese ink in an ombré effect. The piece combines Asian art and Brutalist design influences and has been exhibited to acclaim at several museums, galleries, and art fairs including PAD Paris and Masterpiece in London. “It’s like a meditative object,” Vignault says, “a functional sculpture that asks what it means to inhabit a space or interact with a surface. The title clearly situates the object within a philosophical framework, challenging the viewer to consider essence over appearance, contemplation over consumption.”