Atlanta artist Jiha Moon has always made her Korean heritage part of her art.
Born in DaeGu, Korea, but a longtime resident of the United States, Moon’s colorful, visually delightful paintings tend to blend imagery from Asian art: dragons, stalks of bamboo, cranes and fans with more contemporary fixations: Disney and anime, emoticons, kewpie dolls and a manic cyclone of other pop culture references.
“Yellow Wave” is a typically culturally-rich work featured in her solo show “Foreign Love” at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. The piece features bright yellow 1960s smiley faces, fortune cookie fortunes and visual allusions to Native American art, Mexican pinatas and Pennsylvania Dutch imagery in a painting in acrylic done on traditional Korean handmade paper—hanji. It’s a head-spinning collage of references mixed up with the more abstracted, cartoonish forms Moon favors: fat cotton-candy colored clouds, curling ribbons of white smoke and plumes of blue vapors like something spewing from a magic genie’s lamp.
A first impression of “Foreign Love” might be overstimulation at the variety of cultural references and the blazing colors of hot pink, neon blue and rain slicker yellow. But that visual overload is part of the point. Moon’s work is about the mad flurry of cultural references that anyone growing up with feet straddling two different worlds might see and how that barrage could fundamentally shape a person’s consciousness.
“Foreign Love” keeps your eyeballs working overtime and that overstimulation never lets up as you circle the large MOCA-GA space dedicated to Moon’s work.
“Foreign Love” is an even more intense immersion in the cultural clash and personal inspirations for Moon’s work. The show mixes the more familiar paintings on hanji that Moon is known with a promising new body of work: sculptures that reference the kind of ornamental vases you’d find decorating an Asian home or business. Moon takes those recognizable forms and mutates them, creating vaguely familiar but diabolically inventive new objects. It often feels in “Foreign Love” as if you are entering more fully into the artist’s world and state of mind in a more immersive way than you would had this show been just a survey of paintings. Two large installations in the center of the room which suggest low supper tables set for a dinner or social occasion intensify the feeling that we have slipped not only into Moon’s artwork, but a state of mind blending tradition and novelty, the revered and the throwaway.
That enlarged sense of Moon’s work is one of the benefits of the annual Working Artist Project grant, which allows artists the opportunity to explore another dimension of their work. Moon is one of three female winners — including Shara Hughes and Katherine Taylor — of the 2012/2013 Working Artist Project grant which recognizes metropolitan Atlanta artists of merit and awards them with an exhibition, a studio assistant and a stipend.
Those ceramic sculptures suggest a promising new direction in Moon’s work, and suggest some of the strange and inspirational objects that might have surrounded the artist as she grew up. But a more careful pruning might have better expressed her ideas: some of the vessels are simply more ad hoc and less compelling.
Many of these vessels like “Peach Dragon” of a beast gripping a delicate white peach in its mouth have been decorated with flowers or plants, all fake, all painted in garish colors to further remove them from nature. In fact, much of Moon’s work focuses on that mash-up of the fake and the real. As much as she is illustrating a cultural clash, Moon is also addressing larger issues: the conflict between beauty and ugliness and the one between nature and artifice in this challenging show.
Art Review
“Foreign Love”
Through Nov. 2, 2013. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. $5, non-members; $1, students with ID and seniors 65+; free, children 6 years of age and under, members and active U.S. military,. Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, 75 Bennett Street, Suite A2. 404-367-8700, www.mocaga.org.
Bottom line: A fascinating peek into the swirling blend of Korean and American influences that compose artist Jiha Moon’s consciousness.
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