MOON Jiha: Springfield

Arario Gallery Seoul Samcheong is pleased to present the opening of Springfield, a solo exhibition by American-based artist Jiha Moon, on February 1st 2012. Currently residing in Atlanta, US, Jiha Moon (born in 1973) is one of representative Korean artists with a thriving art practice in America. Springfield presents over 30 various experimental works the artist has produced in the last three years, and has immense significance as the artist’s first solo show in Korea.

Inspired by one of the most generic and universal town names found in America, England and Canada, the title Springfield suggests a type of utopia, or the ideal place where everyone coexists peacefully. Existing only in the imagination of artists, day-dreamers or community planners, Springfield is also the name of the town in which the satirical cartoon The Simpsons is based.

In Moon’s works, contradictory elements are elaborately combined in one surface, forming various layers. Incongruous elements like cartoony icons and elaborate images, Eastern and Western cultures, and old and new co-exist. However, these elements don’t compromise to form a new result, but collide into each other and exist in symbiosis. The resulting tension, chaos and dichotomic structure symbolizes questions regarding identity the artist has had to pose upon herself as an Asian foreigner living in America for the last 10 years. Rather than portraying an unrealistic and idealistic world by employing mysterious and ambiguous metaphors, the artist expresses the divided reality that she observes. Moon’s works reflect her identity as a foreigner that cannot completely fit in with the American society, as well as portraying a cross-section of the contemporary society in which a symbol is read differently and in multiple ways according to the individual.

The artist spontaneously expands on the insignificant traces and lines in her work. To the artist, the “line” is not so much a means of representation, as it is an autonomous element that actively and freely transforms and changes its character. This symbolizes the artist and her endeavors to adapt to reality by transforming herself. Based on spontaneity, Moon’s artistic approach does not capture the representation of reality as seen through the physical eye, but the images instinctively produced within. The ironic reality confronted by the artist is not an ambiguous, uncertain and invariable completeness, but transforms according to the observer. One might read the red and blue in the painting as a symbol of the Korean flag, while some read it as superman. Such disparity of definition clearly demonstrates the uncertainty in the judgment of reality. The artist’s characteristic language of weightless spontaneous images expresses the myriad of cultures the artist has experienced, as well as symbolizing the diversity and individuality yielding multi-layered readings of her work.

Jiha Moon received her MFA from Ehwa Women’s University, Korea, and Iowa State University in US. Working in New York and Washington D.C., Moon has held solo exhibitions at Clough-Hanson Gallery and Mary Ryan Gallery in New York in 2011, Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta in 2010, and Curator’s Office, Washington in 2009. Her works have been collected by over ten major art institutions in US including UBS collection, Asia Society & Museum, and the Smithsonian Museum. She was also honored with the 2011 Painter and Sculpture Grant by The Joan Mitchell Foundation. A foundation based in New York, The Joan Mitchell Foundation’s annual grant is awarded to the 25 finalists among artists chosen by over 400 curators throughout America, for their artistic talent and prospective.