Jihye Han awarded 2025 Artist Advancement Grant

Jihye Han of Exeter spent many hours of her childhood in South Korea doodling, reading colorful cartoon books and watching Disney movies. Her pastimes provided a paradise or gateway that spurred her imagination between long hours of academic study.

Now, the accomplished artist, sculptor and art educator channels her imagination into pottery, paintings and larger works that reflect her life experiences through traditional and contemporary art forms.

With help from the 2025 Piscataqua Region Artist Advancement Grant from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, Jihye (pronounced: JEE’ hey) hopes to expand her work to larger pieces with a wider selection of materials and encourage audiences and her students to explore their own identity through her art and theirs.

“In my work, I strive to bridge past and present, blending the traditions of Korea with the influences of America, just as I embody both cultures,” she said.

The Phillips Exeter Academy instructor draws on Korean folk tales, folk paintings, proverbs and ancient phrases as well as her own experiences to create vivid paintings, sculptures and larger installations.

The traditional Korean ceramic moon jar is central to Jihye’s work. Their simple round shape is inspired by the full moon, which symbolizes prosperity and good fortune. Adorned with Jihye’s expressive painting, each is a multi-culture, thought-provoking personal story.

Many of Jihye’s moon jar illustrations include tigers, dear to her because Korea once was known as “The Land of the Tiger” and she was born in “The Year of the Tiger.” She identifies with the tiger’s symbolism — strength, resilience, and protection — and often includes tigers in her work to depict herself.

Jihye creates moon jars with pure white porcelain clay, in tribute to Korea’s national color and in reverence to her heritage and ancestors.

Traditionally, moon jars are made in two halves, with the top and bottom then joined to form a single, seamless whole. The process reflects her journey of living between two worlds.

“Like the two halves of a moon jar becoming one, I bring together my Korean and American identities to create a unified sense of home,” Jihye said.

In her apartment studio, surrounded by moon jars, shelves of paint bottles and countless paint brushes and doodling pencils, Jihye said she plans to use the grant in part to invest in different clays and other materials to reflect diversity in her work, equipment to help explore new techniques and larger studio space.

She plans to make larger moon jars and assemble a series of jars in story-telling narratives to engage viewers and students and encourage them to reflect on their own stories and cultural experiences — perhaps fostering a deeper understanding of cultural identity, transformation and belonging.

In earlier works, Jihye’s parents were a frequent inspiration. She said her infant daughter, Lumi, born early this year, and her husband, Yeonsoo, have added a new dimension to her inspiration.

She sees baby toys as more than playthings, for instance, examining their shape and bright colors.  And she equates the roundness of the moon jar to a soon-to-be mom, or a new mom holding an infant.

Many of Jihye’s previous works can fit in the palm of your hand. As a new mother, she is looking to sculpt jars large enough to hug — like, well, a baby.

“My perspective, my attitude and my behavior are already shifting, so I can’t wait to make new work,” she said.

Jihye is co-curating an online exhibit titled DrawnTo that opens in November.

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The $25,000 Piscataqua Artist Advancement grant is one of the largest unrestricted grants awarded to a single artist in the country. Finalists in 2025 were comics and sequential artist Isabella Rotman of Berwick, Maine, and photographer Cozette Russell of Lee, N.H. Each received $1,500.