Press

Asia shapes two art shows at the AU Museum

East and West converge in different ways in the work of Miya Ando and Jiha Moon, two Asia-rooted female artists who have shows in adjacent galleries at the American University Museum. While Moon’s art includes some conspicuous American ingredients, Ando’s work might seem to be purely Asian.

“Most Everyone’s Mad Here,” a 2015 work by Jiha Moon, whose dominant motifs are more explicitly Asian but have pop art elements, too. (Jiha Moon)

No muscle cars are evident in Jiha Moon’s “Double Welcome, Most Everyone’s Mad Here,” but there are many other American things. Smiley faces, video-game characters and Pennsylvania Dutch folk symbols jostle in the artist’s busy collage-paintings, alongside Asian-style birds, tigers, dragons and flowers. Peaches represent fecundity in Asia, as well as Moon’s now-home of Georgia. “I am a cartographer of cultures,” she writes in her artist’s statement.

The balance is tipped more toward East than West, in part because many of the pieces are painted on fan-shaped pieces of Korean-made mulberry paper. The dominant visual motifs are usually Asian, although acrylic paint is paired with ink, and shards of text employ the Latin alphabet as well as Korean and Chinese writing systems.

The second phrase in the show’s title is derived from “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” as “filtered through” the 1951 Disney cartoon adaptation, according to art critic Lilly Wei’s notes on the show. Walt Disney, whose legacy in East Asia is immense, may well be a bigger influence on Moon’s idiosyncratic brand of pop art than Andy Warhol or Jasper Johns.

The specifically Korean elements in Moon’s work are often also specifically female. Some of the paintings are framed by quilted fabric borders, and there’s an array of variations on traditional women’s ornaments, their colorful tassels hanging against a white gallery wall. (These charms, like the Pennsylvania Dutch emblems that Moon incorporates, are supposed to convey good luck.)

Domestic ceramic goods in Moon’s exhibition feature a “hipster mustache” and fortune cookie shapes. (Jiha Moon)

A low table set with the artist’s ceramics is a further expression of her interest in domestic crafts often associated with women. Included are pieces in the shape of fortune cookies, another cross-cultural perplexity. They’re widely considered Chinese but actually originated in Japan.

If Ando’s Buddhist-industrial style emulates nature — detached and pristine — Moon’s is more urban and internationalist. The bustling, bright-hued art in “Double Welcome, Most Everyone’s Mad Here” is as lively as a stroll through Seoul or Hong Kong, keeping one eye on Lancaster County, Pa., and the artist’s current home town. Moon’s work is Asian and American, the boundaries deliberately blurred.

IF YOU GO
Miya Ando: Kumo
Jiha Moon: Double Welcome, Most Everyone’s Mad Here

American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. 202-885-1300. american.edu/museum.

Dates: Through May 27.

Admission: Free.