Jaye Moon (Born 1963, Seoul, South Korea, currently lives and works in New York, United States)

In her artistic creation, Jaye Moon illuminates the interaction between spaces and places. At the beginning of her art journey, she was interested in architectural design and portable lifestyle, using Lego and Plexiglas. Her ongoing projects Building a Shelter Together and Portable Housing are the perfect examples of her early approach, in which the former encourages the visitors to interact with the artwork in order to understand the function of art, while the latter exists with the environment to catch the eyes of visitors to help them to be aware of their surroundings. However, Moon shifts her artistic attention to the integration of art and fashion. Her improves her idea of this hybridization basing on her earlier bag works to create a more tangible form of art – the handbag. She believes the art in contemporary time is gradually becoming popular than before because she finds the increasing acceptance in venues inclining toward fashion and social networking. Additionally, she thinks we can also communicate with the art through participation instead of looking.

Where should the line be drawn between art and fashion? Is art for collecting and fashion for shopping? Is art becoming an activity of creating fashion and for shopping? To answer these questions, her recently works create sculptures made of Lego, Plexiglas, and home-interior detail items like door-knobs, handles, etc. They all contain sculptural and architectural elements, but in the context of this new work, the result is fashionable handbags. Each of the handbags combines minimal art with architectural spaces. They present an intimate space, and more importantly, they suggest something like accessories that one might want to carry them as a fashionable object. She hopes these works can be a reflection of taste and identity to meet the public, rather than merely keeping them at home as a personal collection. The more art resembles fashion, the more the consumption of art resembles a more popular or practical consumerism.

After receiving MFA from Pratt Institute in 1994, Moon has exhibited at various locations including New York, New Jersey, Madrid, Tokyo, Seoul and Cheongju. Moon has won several awards, such as the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), and AHL Foundation grant. She also participated in the Cheongju Art Studio Residency in Korea, and Fountainhead Residency and BRIC/Rotunda Gallery Video Residency in the US. Her work was reviewed by multiple leading art news organisations such as Art in America, Artforum.com and News Week (Korean Version). Also, she was selected as one of the top ten artists in NADA Art Fair in Miami by Art in America in 2012. Moon has worked with Lego blocks as an art medium since 1996. Inspiring elements of both artistic consideration and architectural design in her works depicting suitcases and furniture. In 2011 she started creating site-specific interactive public artworks using Lego blocks, such as tree houses, wall drawings, and installations, which integrate architecture and nature. Her public Lego projects have been shown in various locations across the US as well as in England, Japan and Korea. In 2015, her Lego project Web City was selected as one of the events in Roppongi Art Night in Japan. She is currently participating in a group exhibition at Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in Gyeonggi-do, Korea, and has been nominated for the 2017 Sovereign Asian Artist Prize in Hong Kong.