“I am a sponge and
observe everything and adopt things into my work.”
Jiha Moon
Jiha Moon
Not only does the Korean born, American based artist Jiha Moon observe things she is
also an avid collector of ephemera.
As she told Blouin
Art Info’s Ashton Cooper “I collect many things from all over the
place. I have hundreds of souvenirs and knick-knacks in my studios.”
And often
images of and from her memorabilia find their way into her paintings, prints
and ceramics; her cartographic explorations of the cross cultural influences
that make up our increasingly globalized world.
As she
explained to the New
American Paintings Blog’s, Paul Boshears
“The cultural maps I make explore the ways in which an image can be read
in one way in one culture and have a totally different read in another culture.
Translating cultural incongruities is one of the most exciting and nerve-wracking
experiences I have. They happen every day. I’m not digging through a book of
art history or philosophy; my work is concerned with the everyday experience.
The images I use are commonly experienced, they’re everyday experiences that
are familiar to anyone, but I twist them. I make these icons less recognizable
with many layers and draw the audience into these weird positions where the
images feel familiar, but they can’t name it quickly. In this sense, the maps
that I am building are more of a ‘mindscape.”
A mindscape
that is concerned with misunderstands that can arise in our instant communication
that ignores the different meanings an icon can have in different cultures.
About which
Moon has elaborated, stating “Iconography is the most important layer to
understanding my work because icons mean a lot in our everyday lives. Everyone
today has a computer or a cell phone and they employ icons to mediate the
intention of the users. If you want to communicate with others, there is an
icon that has to be pushed or selected in order for you to communicate. It’s
everywhere, like a visual dictionary of communication. In this way, I think of
the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. I use his smile a lot in my work. He
can be a very humorous addition, but he’s also very misleading. A lot of the
time, presupposing identification can mislead you. I might use a rainbow flag that
would have a strong meaning in a Korean context, but it might also be read like
it was the gay pride flag. My work is largely concerned with misreading and
communication between people.”
The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution’s Catherine Fox wrote
about Moon’s 2010 exhibition Blue
Peony and Impure Thoughts, saying “Moon
moves effortlessly between abstraction and figuration, flatness and depth. She
has begun to add collage. She miraculously corrals all these elements into
energetic but sane compositions. The artist fuses references from cartoons to
colophons with similar aplomb. The delicate blue peony, a symbol of good
fortune in East Asian art, coexists with toothy Pac-man figures made of colored
stickers and Atlanta peaches drawn from graphics on souvenirs.”
Moon’s current exhibition Double Welcome, Most
Everyone's Mad Here is on show at the Kalamazoo
Institute of Arts until the 6th of March next year.
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