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"Painter's Argument," the title of a painting in Jiha Moon's boffo exhibition at Saltworks gallery, might also serve as a declaration of purpose.

One can admire her work as a rich polyglot of references that fuse East and West, high art and pop culture. Fundamentally, the Atlanta artist's concern is the language of painting, and she is fluent in brush stroke, color and composition.

"Yalari-Yala", for example, contains washes as liquid as watercolor, planes of matte color the consistency of poster paint, brushy impasto squiggles and fluid, elegant calligraphy. The painting is a joyful profusion of hot pink, periwinkle, indigo, hunter geen, Lilly pulitzer green and Day-Glo orange.

Moon moves effortlessly between abstraction and fuguration, 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. It's a heady brew that argues not only for painting, but also for Moon as an artist to watch.