“If someone threatens you and you strike a tae kwon do pose, even if you don’t know tae kwon do, they’ll think you do because you’re Asian,” says Jiha Moon. “My work does a similar thing.”

Like many artists who create work outside their native cultures, the 40-year-old Korean-born artist incorporates elements of her original and adopted homes in complex, multivalent works rich with symbolism and intrigue. Asian motifs — peonies, fiery dragon heads and calligraphy — share space with piñatas, the Starbucks mermaid, the Tiger Balm tiger and Martha Stewart scrapbooking stickers. Birds play a big role as well, from Angry Birds, lovebirds and the “Hecho en Mexico” Aztec eagle to Audubon-worthy specimens. Moon layers materials and metaphors in order to upend stereotypes and cultural assumptions, mixing East and West, high and low, fact and fiction.

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Atlanta–based painter Jiha Moon nabbed a $25,000 grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation—bringing a big win home for the District.

Moon doesn't live in D.C., but her work appears at Curator's Office, and her roots in the city and community run deep. In 2005, she won the $10,000 Trawick Prize, an annual award for artists in the Washington area, and garnered rave reviews for "Symbioland," a solo show that opened at Curator's just days after the award ceremony. (Here are still more.)

Her fourth solo show at Curator's Office will take place in 2012. In the meantime, Curator's Office director Andrea Pollan will be accompanying Moon to Seoul for a solo exhibition at Arario Gallery, for which Pollan has written the catalog text.

So the District still claims Moon as a favorite daughter. Elsewhere, excellent examples of her work—which span media as well as influences—have appeared at Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop and Museum and New York's Drawing Center, among national and international galleries and institutions.

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"Less is more," blah blah blah, but for some artists even "more and more" is not enough. Jiha Moon's exhibition "Day for Night," at Rhodes College's Clough-Hanson Gallery through Oct. 14, shows an astonishing sense of controlled chaos in the 13 pieces that seem, despite an inherent trait of delicacy and fragility, about to burst from the bounds of their edges. The paradox -- delicacy and furious energy, airy patterns and elaborate mess -- permeates this work that manages to be delightful and perplexing without breaking apart at the seams.

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Contemporary visual culture is the ultimate melting pot. It lumps together an assortment of images, slogans, brands and ideas that we unwittingly absorb until the blurred line between image and reality becomes the definition, not the regulator, of American identity. South Korean-born, Atlanta-based artist Jiha Moon navigates this chaotic system with a sophistication and familiarity that comes from a life spent straddling worlds. In her art it is possible to see the mirror image of everyday American life, crowded with ideas that swarm against each other with equal parts opposition and harmony.

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Jiha Moon is an Atlanta-based painter whose gestural paintings explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. Featured in editions editions 63, 70, and 82 of New American Paintings, Moon was recently a finalist for the Hudgens Prize, selected by jurors that include the Curator of Prints at The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Director and Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs at The New Museum. I had the chance to visit with Moon at her studio where we discussed her recent incorporation of fabric and collage, a bold step for someone who self-identifies as “a painter’s painter.” More images, and our conversation, after the jump. —Paul Boshears, Atlanta contributor

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Jiha Moon's increased confidence is evident in this new series of paintings. The tension between figuration and abstraction still pervades her repeated layering of traditional Asian landscapes and gestural expressionism. But this new work seems to revel in the joy of painting, alternating thin washes of Ink with delicately rendered objects and thick impasto brushstrokes, all on Moon's favored handmade hanji paper. Collage also figures in some of the works, as when she adds paper to extend her painted surface from the rectangular picture plane or incorporates fabric appliqués, possibly an influence from her ongoing residency al The Fabric Workshop.

The South Korean-born, Atlanta-based artist still wrestles with the notion of shifting identities, particularly in our image-laden society. Pac-Man-like figures with razor sharp teeth, butterflies, and even Wonderland's Alice find their way into her peaceful landscapes with floating clouds and trees, which are interrupted and by bursts of energetic color. The work speaks of a society that not only straddles two cultures but also occupies a third – in cyberspace. Moon's professed hero Philip Guston started in 1960, “[P]ainting is impure. It is the adjustment of impurities which forces painting’s continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden. Moon seems to have taken this to heart in her current exhIbition (titled "Blue Peony and Impure Thoughts” in Guston's honor), providing thought provoking interpretations of the multilayered and image-rich world she inhabits.