Artist Jiha Moon will speak about her work during a reception for the artist at the Salina Art Center, talk begins at 7:30pm. Moon's work is featured in Jiha Moon: Double Welcome, Most Everyone's Mad Here, an exhibition on view at the Art Center through June 12. The presentation and reception are FREE and open to the public.
Jiha Moon harvests cultural elements native to Korea, Japan, and China, uniting them with Western elements to investigate the multifaceted nature of our current global identity as influenced by popular culture, technology, racial perceptions, and folklore. For example, Moon includes characters from the video game Angry Birds and smartphone emojis alongside Asian tigers and Indian gods, in compositions that appear at once familiar and foreign. At first glance, the artist's work appears as a mash-up of high-and-low brow cultural references. On further inspection, slyly ironic and humorous references emerge that are satirically filtered by the artist, who reminds us that our preconceived notion of "others" is not a true manifestation of actual identity.
Born and raised in Daegu, Korea, Jiha Moon lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, and her BFA from Korea University in Seoul, Korea. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Asia Society, New York City; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond Virginia; and the Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 2011 Moon was the recipient of a prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant.
Jiha Moon: Double Welcome, Most Everyone's Mad Here is organized by the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia, in collaboration with the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston School of the Arts in Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibition is curated by Amy G. Moorefield, Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Collections at the Taubman Museum of Art and Mark Sloan, Director and Chief Curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art.