Jiha Moon
Blue Peony and Impure Thoughts
Exhibitions Dates: January 23, 2010 – March 6, 2010
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 23, 6pm-9pm
SALTWORKS is pleased to present Blue Peony and Impure Thoughts, featuring new works on paper and an installation by Atlanta-based artist Jiha Moon. The exhibition will be on view from January 23, 2010 through March 6, 2010. This is the second solo exhibition on Ms. Moon's work at the gallery.
For a new viewer of Moon’s work, initially, these swirling, mythical landscapes—boldly colored and finely detailed—appear tightly focused, paying homage to traditional Asian artistic styles and techniques. While present, through sustained looking, subversion and Western influence becomes equally apparent. The visual complexity in each painting is plain; even large, multi-hued plumes of paint are veiled with systems of thin, sinewy lines, such as in Painter’s Argument. Yet Moon’s ultimate goal is not to impress through pristine beauty. Layers of strange figures come into view: disembodied limbs, computer icons, or fanged, Pacman-like creatures.
The unnatural abounds in everyday life and in Moon’s compositions, like the blue peony, found in Cheoyong and others. Traditional pink or white peonies represent luxury and wealth—the opposite of lotuses, which signify spirituality—but blue peonies don’t exist in nature, twisting the expectation of these signature shapes.
Moon’s increasingly tactile surfaces draw from Philip Guston’s thick oil paint application; instead, it is achieved through such means as embroidery or overpainting with matte medium. Guston had an innate ability to accept the chaotic; he made drastic, stylistic shifts—representational, abstract, figurative—at times facing consternation from his peers for doing so. As Guston described, in a quote referenced in this exhibition’s title and driving force, “…painting is "impure". It is the adjustment of impurities which forces painting's continuity.”
-Excerpt from exhibition essay by Stephanie Green.
Jiha Moon lives and works in Atlanta, GA. Recent solo exhibitions include Turbulence Utopia, Mint Museum, Charolette, NC and Pleasant Purgatory, Brain Factory, Seoul, Korea. Selected group exhibitions include the One Way or Another, Asia Society and Museum, NY (traveling); Currents, Recent Acquisitions, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Movement, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Art on Paper Biennial, Weatherspoon Museum, NC. Selected artist residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, Golden Foundation fellowship, Sausalito, CA; Art Omi International Artists Residency, Ghent, NY; and the Singapore Tyler Print Institute, artist residency awarded by Asia Society and Museum, New York, NY. Moon is currently an artist-in-residence at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadephia, PA
Artist CV
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