Exhibitions

JIHA MOON: FAMILIAR FACES

University Art Gallery (The University of the South) / 68 Georgia Ave., Sewanee, TN January 15, 2019 - March 11, 2019

Jiha Moon

Freely combining imagery, techniques and materials from disparate places and cultural registers, Jiha Moon questions the value of origins. As she writes, “The world is so interconnected nowadays, how can one even tell where someone or something “comes from” anymore?” She draws pictorial references from sources as seemingly distinct as Korean temple paintings and Walt Disney cartoons, synthesizing them into a visual language that is both strange and familiar. Her materials are equally synthetic and hard to pin down, acrylic paint applied to traditional Korean mulberry paper Hanji, or ceramics that reference multiple world traditions. Self-described as a “cartographer of cultures and an icon maker of fictive worlds,” Moon “purposefully create(s) images whose origins are hard to identify.” Identity is treated as slippery and shifting, impossible to pin to geographic location, citizenship, ethnicity, or race.