Jiha Moon
Yellowave (Double Firework), 2023
Stoneware, underglaze, glaze
Courtesy of the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025

This ceramic is part of Jiha Moon’s Yellowave series. She uses the color yellow to convey a “social, political, or cultural point of view,” acknowledging its historical association with racial slurs directed at Asian Americans. By prominently and abundantly incorporating yellow in her work, she subverts these biases and reclaims it as a symbol of joy.

Peaches, dumplings, and banana peels are some of her recurring motifs. She values the way they hover between a multitude of contexts, making them simultaneously familiar and hard to pin down. In a 2022 interview with Guernica magazine, she said she cherishes art that leads to ambiguity, even misreadings. “For me, this misunderstanding is often the first step of understanding.” As a Korean who moved to the United States in her twenties, she knows that different audiences will see peaches as symbols of good luck (Korea), the state of Georgia (the U.S.), or maybe as comical sets of breasts and buttocks. Dumplings are a pan-cultural unifier, but viewers from different backgrounds will read them as “mandu,” (Korean) “gyoza,” (Japanese) or “pierogi” (Polish), all with different associations.