Artist Jiha Moon @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - "Fool's Moon" Exhibition

Jiha Moon: Fool's Moon

Derek Eller Gallery, New York

October 25 – December 21, 2024

JIHA MOON 

What Happens When We Die?, 2024 

Earthenware, underglaze, glaze, 15.75 x 16.5 x 5 inches

© Jiha Moon, courtesy Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by JIHA MOON. Borrowing imagery, forms, and materials from Asian folklore and traditions, contemporary popular culture, and Western art history, Jiha Moon creates a mashed-up globalized dialect that speaks to identity, cultural displacement, and miscommunication.

The ever-expanding vocabulary within Jiha Moon’s visual language takes some new and notable turns in this exhibition. She explains:

“The title Fool’s Moon comes from my childhood memories of making wishes while gazing at the full moon on Lunar New Year’s Day in Korea. During those moments, we hoped for good health and happiness in the days ahead. This ritual has become a habit for me, and every time I see the full moon, I engage in wishful thinking. It’s not religion, totemism, or witchcraft—but in some ways, it might be a little of all three.

I’m presenting acrylic paintings on Hanji paper, hybrid ceramic paintings, ceramic sculptures, and Korean Bojagi which are quilt painting collaborations I made with my 97-year-old grandmother. I incorporate iconic images, shapes, and colors to convey my wishful thinking during these chaotic times. The powerful Korean Haetae—a mythical hybrid creature—is reimagined as my silly, helpless poodles in a large painting on paper titled Blue Haetae. In my ceramic piece Banana Wreath, rotten banana peels symbolize the aging process, especially that of a woman’s skin, and I seek to glorify this transformation by using crystal glaze.

In Nocturne (American Beautyberry), I use banana peels as symbols of second-generation Asian Americans—pejoratively compared to bananas, yellow on the outside and white on the inside—who are taught by their elders to survive through assimilation. These figures are camouflaged within night scenes, accented with the hues of American beautyberry. Additionally, I reference the Korean drag queen Kimchi and Keanu Reeves, whose life quotes resonate deeply with me, borrowing their voices to tell my story.

In today’s vulnerable climate, I feel that we are all fools, clinging to hope and making wishes—sentiments I capture and reflect upon through the works in this exhibition.”

JIHA MOON (b. 1973) lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. She received a BFA from Korea University, Seoul, an MFA from Ewha Woman’s University, Seoul, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Art at Florida State University, Tallahassee. Moon is a 2023 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Fine Arts. Her work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition The Shape of Power: Stories of Race in American Sculpture at Smithsonian American Art Museum (November 2024). Jiha Moon has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally including the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; FSU Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, FL; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR; and The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA. Her work is in the collections of the Asian Art Museum, San Fransico, CA; Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Asia Society and Museum, New York, NY; Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; and Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, among many others. This is her third solo exhibition at the Derek Eller Gallery.

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.derekeller.com

Dawn Black, Victoria Dugger, Raheleh Filsoofi, Jiha Moon, Judy Rushin-Knopf, Tori Tinsley, Mie Yim - "emotion" Exhibition Curated by Jiha Moon & Veronica Kessenich @ Laney Contemporary, Savannah

emotion

Dawn Black, Victoria Dugger, Raheleh Filsoofi, Jiha Moon, Judy Rushin-Knopf, Tori Tinsley, Mie Yim

Curated by Jiha Moon & Veronica Kessenich

Laney Contemporary, Savannah

September 17 - November 2, 2024

Laney Contemporary presents emotion, a group exhibition guest curated by artist Jiha Moon and art historian and curator Veronica Kessenich, founder of CARCIOFI and former director of Atlanta Contemporary.

The selected artists, named below, are Moon and Kessenich’s response to an oft-spoken truism that women are emotional ... and not in a good way. Effectively, the friendship of these two curators – and their shared histories of having to be quietly demonstrative – inspired a collaboration to exhibit art by women at a woman-owned gallery, that astutely plays to the clichés while eviscerating women’s socially prescribed ‘role.’

In September of 2022, Jiha Moon and Veronica Kessenich talked about a not-so-distant past when their lives were fundamentally different. Marriages and moves, departures and opportunities (and the need to remain ‘professional’ through it all) highlighted the fact that women often ‘suppress’ to ‘succeed.’ Jiha Moon soon identified seven artists (a number which is linked to intellect and not emotion) who represent the duality of what it means to exist today.

Empowering both individuals and groups is of special interest to Dawn Black. Her use of collected source material, as seen in her Conceal Project: For and Against Grabbers and First Rebels Descending, takes on perceived gender roles, the mythology of women (as creators and destroyers), and the necessity to transcend proscribed constraints. Utilizing gouache, ink, and watercolor, her works on paper invoke a thunderously quiet protest.

Mirrors and the human gaze offer Victoria Dugger the opportunity to present viewers with newly perceived realities. Her worldview as a disabled Black woman informs her richly layered surfaces, beautifully rendered anthropomorphic figures, and lumpy sculptures adorned with the trappings of femininity. The strength of Victoria Dugger’s imagery emerges from her visions of alternate worlds, ones in which ambiguity and experience lead the audience to places where the grass may be a little greener.

The physical bite of artist Raheleh Filsoofi is her act of resistance and resilience. She uses her own body, hands, and mouth to transcend the colonialism, history, and labor of clay. She slowly, methodically, sinks her teeth into clay artifacts that she makes, leaving a permanent mark as protagonist, antagonist, observer, and participant in the narrative of life.

Reappropriating and reconsidering Eastern and Western motifs, including Keanu Reeves, the color yellow, Roy Lichtenstein’s brush stroke, Buddhas, peaches and fortune cookies, is both a modus operandi and an oversimplification of the technical genius in Jiha Moon’s work. Her paintings and ceramics do not fit within any defined canon. Jiha effectively acts as cartographer, charting her own journey from immigrant to citizen, daughter to mother, student to teacher. Her playfully fierce works resist simple definitions – getting to know her is akin to finding the key on the map.

Instability, balance, and the energetic continuum are represented through three textile works by artist Judy Rushin-Knopf. Her Vital Signs series came about at a time of suspended reality where the illness of a loved one, combined with the trauma of the pandemic, necessitated an exploration in materiality. Using cloth, which can be read as both comforting and oppressive, her works evoke the importance of time and its numerous stages.

Often using imagery from her children’s drawings, Tori Tinsley’s paintings and sculptures traverse childhood innocence alongside the caregiving roles essential to daughter and mother. Her Sleepers series, presented in this exhibition, utilizes bold and expressive painting techniques to represent the uninhibited demands of giving, receiving, and the ultimate loss of love.

Mie Yim’s paintings navigate abstraction and representation, her imagery seemingly lacking focal points while achieving connections. Her visual vocabulary is informed by her childhood trauma as an immigrant. Her iconography of bubbles, crevices, excavations, and blankets, combined with gutsy color choices and supernatural creatures, are intended to overwhelm and disorient. By extending her marks to the edges of the paper she allows no room to breathe, no space to relax. Just a fascinating discomfort.

These seven artists are expressive, aggressively colorful, and boldly shy. Their emotion vibrates with the energy of who they are as mothers, daughters, teachers, people of color, and immigrants.

About the Curators:

Veronica L. Hogan (née Kessenich) is a museum director, curator, art historian, educator, collector, former art dealer, fundraising consultant and writer. Drawn to the history of art at a young age, she became fascinated with the language of art (color, line, shape, form … ) and the inspiration behind artists and their works. She earned an M.Phil in Art History from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland (2004) and her BA in Art History from Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN (2001) and has taught since 2006 at Agnes Scott College (Atlanta), SCAD-Atlanta, the Art Institutes of Atlanta and Decatur, and has lectured at the University of Georgia, Emory University, Oglethorpe University, and others.

Jiha Moon is from DaeGu, Korea and lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa and is currently Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University. Her works have been acquired by Asia Society, the High Museum of Art, the Mint Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Taubman Museum of Art, the Mint Museum of Art, and the Cheekwood Museum of Art, among other places. She has been included in group shows at the Kemper Museum, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Asia Society, The Drawing Center, White Columns, Smith College Museum of Art, and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.

LANEY CONTEMPORARY

1810 Mills B. Lane Blvd, Savannah, Georgia 31405

www.laneycontemporary.com

Jiha Moon @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - Stranger Yellow

Jiha Moon: Stranger Yellow

Derek Eller Gallery, New York

January 6 - February 5, 2022

JIHA MOON

Stranger face, yellow spirit, 2021

Ink, acrylic, ceramic, resin on Hanji mounted on panel

24 x 24 x 3 in. / 61 x 61 x 8 cm

© Jiha Moon, courtesy of Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents 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, Jiha 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, Jiha 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, Jiha 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, Jiha 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 Jiha 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. Jiha Moon’s mid-career survey organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum toured more than 10 museum venues around the USA through 2018. This is her second solo exhibition at Derek Eller Gallery.

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

300 Broome Street New York, NY 10002

www.derekeller.com