Purgatory Mutt
Mindy Solomon is pleased to present Purgatory Mutt, the third solo presentation of works by Jiha Moon at the gallery. Bringing together wall-hanging and ceramic sculptures, the exhibition expands upon the artist’s ongoing exploration of hybrid and mythical creatures — figures that bridge folklore, personal narrative, and contemporary life experience.
“As a Korean immigrant woman who recently became a U.S. citizen, my relocation to Florida has had a strong impact on my practice. For this exhibition, I focused on creating ceramic sculptures that embody magical beings rooted in Korean folklore, international storytelling, and even the pets that share our everyday lives. I am drawn to reimagining these everyday influences into something powerful — creatures that blur the boundaries between the mythical and the mundane. I imagine, for example, the Korean mythological creature Haetae as both a fierce guardian and something as familiar as a pet dog. These beings inhabit a space that I think of as ‘purgatory’ — a reflection of our uncertain present.
The Haetae series is an ongoing body of work based on a mythological beast from 19th-century Korea. This creature excites me because of its wide recognition across East Asia, where it appears under different names such as Fu Dog, Xiezhi, and Shin’yō, each with variations in form — sometimes more dog-like, other times resembling lions or tigers. Through my studio practice of hybridizing multiple iconic images, Haetae has become an important symbolic figure for me, merging the old and new, the multicultural and the personal. Creating my own version of this creature allows me to weave together aspects of identity, heritage, and contemporary life.
Alongside the Haetae series, I introduce the new Jay Skin series, inspired by the Florida scrub jay. This bird, beautiful and resilient, is also endangered, which makes it a poignant symbol for me as a new Florida resident. Building on my earlier Skin series (banana peels), I merge the image of the scrub jay with the peel. Banana peels in my work have long represented the Asian and Asian American community worldwide, while also celebrating the grace of aging and natural beauty. In Jay Skin, these two forms become a hybrid creature — a celebration of resilience, beauty, and the fragility of what we are in danger of forgetting.”
Within this collection of fantastical hybrids, Purgatory Mutt invites viewers into a space of transformation and belonging, where cultural history, migration, and imagination converge. Through this experience, the boundaries between humans, animals, and the spiritually divine become blurred.
About Jiha Moon
Jiha Moon’s gestural paintings, ceramic sculptures, and installations explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and culture. “I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds,” she says. Moon draws from a wide range of influences, including Eastern and Western art histories, Korean temple paintings and folk traditions, popular culture, internet emojis and icons, and product packaging from around the world. She often transforms and distorts these visual languages, making them both unrecognizable and strangely familiar at the same time.
Her work is included in the collections of The Asia Society, The High Museum of Art, The Mint Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Renwick Gallery, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among others. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Painters & Sculptors Grant. Her mid-career survey exhibition, Double Welcome: Most Everyone’s Mad Here, organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and the Taubman Museum, toured more than 15 museums across the U.S. Moon joined the Department of Art at Florida State University as a faculty member in Fall 2023.
