With a deceptively lighthearted touch, Jiha Moon (b. 1973, South Korea) examines the entanglements of, as she puts it, “globalization, identity, and the visual information overload of contemporary society.” Incorporating painting, drawing, collaged Hanji paper, and ceramics, One An Other is now on view in the museum lobby. It represents the most ambitious site-specific installation to date by Moon, who received her MFA degree at the University of Iowa in 2002.
On April 5, 2023, the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation approved the awarding of Guggenheim Fellowships to a diverse group of 171 exceptional individuals. Chosen from a rigorous application and peer review process out of almost 2,500 applicants, these successful applicants were appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
This Present Moment: Crafting Better World
May 13, 2022-April 2, 2023 Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian, Washington DC
This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World showcases American craft like never before. The exhibition highlights the role that artists play in our world to spark essential conversations, stories of resilience, and methods of activism—showing us a more relational and empathetic world. It centers more expansive definitions and acknowledgments of often-overlooked histories and contributions of women, people of color, and other marginalized communities.
On view at SAAM’s Renwick Gallery, This Present Moment activates two floors of gallery space, highlighting over 150 artworks from the museum’s permanent collection in a range of craft mediums from fiber and ceramics to glass and mixed media. Approximately 135 of the featured artworks are new acquisitions, never before seen at the Renwick Gallery.
Stranger Yellow
Derek Eller Gallery January 6 - February 5, 2022
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 6, 6-8 pm
Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings and ceramic sculptures by Atlanta-based artist Jiha Moon. Working with a palette of super-saturated yellows, oranges, magentas and blues against contrasting dark Hanji (Korean mulberry paper) and brown stoneware, Moon mixes ingredients from Asian tradition and folklore, Western contemporary art, and global popular culture to create a vibrant and personal visual language in both two and three dimensions.
Throughout many of the works in this exhibition, Moon incorporates a particular shade of “Stranger Yellow” which she describes as a “mysterious, luscious, yet cautiously high-key color that stands out”. Born in Korea in 1973, Moon has lived in the United States for over twenty years, and this color speaks to her notions of the visibility of the Asian community in America, as well as her own identity as an Asian American artist. The Stranger Yellow manifests itself in myriad ways: as an enlarged Pop brushstroke reminiscent of Lichtenstein, as a banana referencing the pejorative term for an assimilated Asian American, as the flowing blonde hair of a Western princess or Goldilocks, and as the contours of sun-dappled mountains and ocean waves evocative of Asian hanging scrolls.
The centerpiece of the exhibition, a ten-foot diptych entitled Yellowave (Stranger Yellow), contains many of these moves and more. Simultaneously chaotic and meditative, the painting pictures a large fluid landscape of swooping yellow in which twisted and patterned fortune cookies mingle with flowers and creatures from Korean folk art. A Blue Willow pattern motif (coopted from China by 18th Century Western design) occurs throughout. In a seamless cross-pollination of East and West, Moon incorporates additional invented and appropriated iconography in other paintings and sculpture, including Mexican Otomi dolls, Milagros, face jugs of the American South, emojis, tattoo design, and peaches (a symbol of immortality in Asian culture and a simultaneous nod to Moon’s hometown of Atlanta). She deftly utilizes this ever expanding vocabulary of imagery to explore relevant issues of identity, cultural displacement, and miscommunication.
Jiha Moon (born 1973, Daegu, South Korea) lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She had a recent solo exhibition at Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts at University of Alabama, Birmingham, AL and was included in “State of the Art 2020” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK and “45 at 45” at L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA. She has had solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Atlanta; The Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN; James Gallery of CUNY Graduate Center, NY, among others. She has been included in group shows at Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO; Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; Asia Society, New York; and The Drawing Center, NY. Moon’s mid-career survey organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum toured more than 10 museum venues around the country through 2018. This will be her second solo exhibition at the gallery.