APSU's The New Gallery presents "Jiha Moon: Rooted"

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – Austin Peay State University’s The New Gallery, with support from the APSU Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts and the APSU Department of Art + Design, will begin the Spring semester of its exciting 2019-2020 exhibition season with Jiha Moon: Rooted

The exhibit opens Tuesday, Jan. 21, at The New Gallery, located in the Art + Design Building on the APSU campus, and runs through Feb. 14. Moon will give a public lecture at 6 p.m. on Feb. 5 in the building’s Heydel Hall. There will be a reception from noon-1 p.m. the following day, Feb. 6, and a gallery talk with Moon beginning at 12:30 p.m. All events are free and open to the public.

Jiha Moon

Jiha Moon is from DaeGu, Korea, and she lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. Moon’s gestural paintings, mixed media, ceramic sculpture and installation explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures.

 “I have been enamored with Jiha’s work for several years now, and I’m excited to present her work to the Clarksville community,” Michael Dickins, director of The New Gallery, said. “Her work is fun and engaging as she mixes historical and pop culture iconography from both Korean and American cultures. She was recently selected for the prestigious State of the Art 2020 exhibition put on by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and was selected by ArtNet News as one of six break-out artists from that exhibition. It is a privilege to show her work at Austin Peay.”

Moon says of herself, “I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds.” Her cues span Eastern and Western art history, colors and designs from popular culture, Korean temple paintings and folk art, internet emoticons and icons, fruit stickers and labels for commercial products. She often teases and changes these lexicons so that they are hard to identify while remaining somewhat familiar.

Moon received her MFA from the University of Iowa. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the Taubman Museum, Roanoke, Virginia; the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina; The Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville; Rhodes College, Clough-Hanson Gallery, Memphis; and James Gallery of CUNY Graduate Center, New York City, New York.

She has been included in group shows at Kemper Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; the Asia Society, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; White Columns, New York; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, North Carolina.

Her works have been acquired by the Asia Society, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte; Smithsonian Institute, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro; and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

She received the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation’s painter and sculptor’s award for 2011. Her mid-career survey exhibition, “Double Welcome: Most everyone’s mad here,” organized by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum, toured more than 10 museum venues around the country.

For more on Moon and her work, visit: jihamoon.com.

The New Gallery is open Monday–Friday, 9 a.m.–4 p.m. The gallery is closed on weekends and holidays, and it follows the University’s academic calendar. For more information on this exhibition, which is free and open to the public, contact Dickins at dickinsm@apsu.edu.