"Angry Bird Red Gook Vase"

HAELY CHANG, Jane and Raphael Bernstein Associate Curator of East Asian Art 

With Angry Bird Red Gook Vase, Korean American artist Jiha Moon skillfully plays with the different meanings of the same word, characters, and iconography in distinct languages and cultures, infusing a touch of humor and irony into her work.
  
The vase's stout round shape is adorned with two peaches, one attached on each side. The peach is a recurring motif in Moon's ceramics, symbolizing both auspicious fortune and exorcism in ancient Asian myths, as well as serving as a state symbol of Georgia, the artist's first home state in the United States. For Moon, the peach intersects Eastern and Western cultures, becoming an ideal icon for her overarching art practice: bridging the cultural gap between East and West, past and present.
  
This interplay of different layers of iconography spans the Angry Bird Red Gook Vase. Using the globular surface of the ceramic as a canvas, Moon draws a pine tree, two Angry Birds, and smiling emojis all over it. The Angry Birds, characters from a digital game popular with young people in the United States, sit on the branch of a pine tree, a widespread symbol of fidelity in Asia. The juxtaposition of the two elements infuses the setting with a sense of humor, if not outright sarcasm, suggesting that loaded cultural interactions can arise in even casual settings with otherwise straightforward icons.
  
Language is perhaps the strongest cultural icon, and Moon does not hesitate to play around with its potential dualities as well. On one side of the vase, the artist writes a large Korean character "국" with bold black ink strokes. In Korean, "국" (pronounced gook) can refer to either a nation or a hot soup and conveys a sense of community. On the other side of the vase, the artist transliterates the term using the alphabet, writing "Gook" in a font style reminiscent of the Google logo. In English, "Gook" once circulated as a derogatory slang term for an Asian person, especially during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. On this vase, then, the same word encompasses competing meanings, complicating our fragmentary view of the norms of our language, culture, and history.
  
Moon asks her audience to experience this ambiguity with a sense of humor and revisit our worldview amidst our often fraught and occasionally funny cultural interactions.

Click here to view this object's catalogue entry.