Guest speaker, Jiha Moon, is from Daegu, South Korea, and currently lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. Moon's gestural paintings, ceramic sculptures, and installations explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. She says, “I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds.” She is taking cues from a wide range of history of Eastern and Western art, colors and designs from popular culture, Korean temple paintings and folk art, internet emoticons and icons, and labels of products from all over the place. She often teases and changes these lexicons so that they are hard to identify yet stay in a familiar zone.  

Moon's work has been acquired by museums around the country including The Asia Society, The High Museum of Art, The Mint Museum of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Renwick Gallery, and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  She is the recipient of the Guggenheim award and Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Painter and Sculptor’s award, and her mid-career survey exhibition, “Double Welcome: Most Everyone’s Mad Here,” organized by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum, has toured more than 15 museums around the country. Moon is an Assistant Professor in the Art department at Florida State University.