Jiha Moon

Personal life and career

Moon was born in Daegu, South Korea in 1973. After earning her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Korea University and her Master of Fine Arts in Western Painting from Ewha Womans University. After graduating, Moon relocated to the United States to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in painting at the University of Iowa.

Works

Moon's paintings combine visual icons and symbols from a variety of sources, cutting across culture lines to the accumulation of art historical, corporate, and advertising symbols in contemporary society. Eastern and Western imagery and painting techniques, emoji, internet icons, and folk art are present in her work. She works primarily in acrylic paint on Hanji, a Korean paper, and incorporates fabrics, embroidery, and print collage in her paintings.

After she completes the abstract version of the composition she re-configures some of the markings to suggest recognizable images, such as cartoon characters. She also incorporates mass-produced items like textiles, embroidered patches, small trinkets.

Her work of art is considered to be dream like, stuffed with Eastern and Western art historical and pop cultural references that challenge fixed notion of cultural identity and represent our information-overloaded world.

Art critic Roberta Smith wrote about Moon's work in the 2005 Asia Society exhibition “One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now," stating, "Jiha Moon packs...information into large, teeming paintings on paper, creating a sense of flux... rife with references to everything from traditional Chinese brush painting to contemporary cartoons."

She has received a number of awards including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, the Trawick Prize, and a Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia Working Artist grant. Moon has been an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Omi International Arts Center, MacDowell Colony, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, and the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion.

Exhibitions

Moon's solo exhibition "Double Welcome: Most Everyone's Mad Here," which was organized by the Taubman Museum of Art and Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, opened at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, VA, in 2015 has or will continue to travel to the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Salina Art Center, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, the Richard E. Peeler Art Center at DePauw University, the Tarble Arts Center at Eastern Illinois University, the American University Museum, and Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagert College. Moon has also had solo exhibitions at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville, TN, the James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, as well as galleries in Atlanta, New York, Seoul, Washington D.C., and Zurich.

Moon has also participated in group exhibitions at the Asia Society, White Columns, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Drawing Center, the International Print Center New York, Smith College Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the High Museum, the McNay Art Museum, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Public collections

Moon's work is represented in a number of major museum collections including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Asia Society, the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Mint Museum, the High Museum, the Asheville Art Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.