Jiha Moon: Nahan’s Forty Winks

In her image- and color-saturated paintings and prints, Jiha Moon mashes up materials, motifs, and techniques to create dreamlike compositions, stuffed with Eastern and Western art historical and pop cultural references that challenge fixed notions of cultural identity and represent our information-overloaded world. Everything is fair game for Moon—she draws from sources high and low, real and virtual, ancient and contemporary, including 13th-century Taoist painting, American Pop, Disney cartoons, Dr. Seuss books, emoticons, fortune cookies, and Asian restaurant menus. Her exuberant compositions stretch and burst across the picture plane. Gestural, abstract passages and calligraphic brushstrokes flow into stylized landscapes, in which viewers may find Snow White consorting with an idealized Chinese female figure, while smiley-faced emoticons and ripe peaches float about them. At once playful and dark, Moon’s work sends-up the persistence of cultural stereotypes in our globalized world.

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