In The Round, Unit London, London, United Kingdom
March 12- April 21 2022

Group Exhibition | In The Round - unitlondon.com

Workshop As… Curated by Francesca Zwang and Karen Patterson
October 26, 2021–August 7, 2022
The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA

Workshop As... - The Fabric Workshop and Museum

It is precisely Moon’s openness to using any source that makes her work flamboyant, captivating, odd, funny, smart, uncanny, comically monstrous, and unsettling. And, most of all, over the top.

 by John Yau
January 13, 2022

I first met Jiha Moon in 2000, when she was in the MFA program at the University of Iowa. Later, I learned that she was born in Daegu, South Korea, in 1973, and came to the United States in the late 1990s, after earning her BFA and MFA in Korea. At that point, she was working largely in painting and printmaking. In 2012, she was awarded a grant from the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, which she used to sign up at a local clay studio in Atlanta, where she has lived for many years. 

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by Jillian Steinhauer

There are so many references in Jiha Moon’s artworks, it can be hard to know where to begin. In “Stranger Yellow,” her show of ceramic sculptures and ink-and-acrylic paintings at Derek Eller Gallery, I spotted bananas, fortune cookies, peaches and Ukiyo-e-inspired creatures; I saw echoes of Roy Lichtenstein’s “Yellow Brushstrokes,” traditional Chinese landscape painting and face jugs from the American South. This cross- pollination is partly a product of biography: Moon grew up in South Korea before moving to the United States in her late 20s. She studied art in both places and eventually settled in Atlanta. But it’s not just hybridity that makes Moon’s art so thrilling; it’s the way these sources of inspiration and pieces of iconography coexist and pile up within individual works. Often the results are delightfully absurd and cartoonish, like the sculpture “Peach Mask Face Jug” (2021), which comes alive with thick, grinning red lips and white teeth, while being adorned all over with faces, foods, hearts and more. Sometimes they’re transportingly meditative, as in the 10-foot-long painting “Yellowave (Stranger Yellow)” (2021), whose undulating brushstrokes could represent a seascape, a storm or something more abstract, like tendrils of memory. Moon’s visual blitz may not be self-important, but it is studied. The key to navigating it here is yellow, a potent color that’s also a slur for Asian Americans. Moon reclaims yellow and weaves it like a thread through her web of signifiers, suggesting that even as our identities become more layered, there’s still a core element that remains. 

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By Johanna Fateman

This Atlanta-based painter and ceramicist, who was born in South Korea in 1973 and has lived in the U.S. for two decades, has developed a strikingly varied vocabulary of forms—elegant, cute, grotesque, and all of the above. “Stranger Yellow,” the title of her appealing, clamorous new show, refers to the color that dominates the works on view, as well as to racist, xenophobic, and sexualized Asian stereotypes and the related dynamics of estrangement and assimilation. Her brightly patterned paintings on hanji (Korean mulberry paper) and her delightfully perverse glazed sculptures mingle images of bananas, fortune cookies, and breasts with botanical motifs and fantastic creatures drawn from Korean folklore, augmented by flowing passages of abstract brushstrokes. The artist’s seamless transition between mediums and her command of symbolic excess make for an absorbing and visually energetic exhibition.

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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. 

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