Hiromi Mizugai Moneyhun: Floating Worlds at FIU's Frost Art Museum
Published January 16th 2026
By Elaine Akin
Sea and land, inside and outside, up and down, heaven and hell, feminine and masculine, East and West: the inherent binary of opposites cannot but compel a bias, a preference, a choice—few less conspicuous than dark over light in Jacksonville-based cut-paper artist Hiromi Mizugai Moneyhun’s (b. 1977) recent Floating Worlds at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum on the Florida International University (FIU) campus in Miami. An introductory text panel in the first gallery notes, “Floating Worlds takes its name from the Japanese woodblock prints of ukiyo-e” developed during the Edo period (and made famous by Katsuki Hokusai’s Great Wave), which saw more modern inventions in science, mechanics, and industrialization. For art, this meant mass production, affordability in collecting, and more liberal content, some appealing to humanity’s most base appetites, as urban subculture blossomed. While Moneyhun’s themes and influences span the gamut of a distinctly Japanese-American perspective, still, the artist draws from an uncontaminated well of authenticity that centers her roots as a tattoo artist in Kyoto, imbuing conventional shapes with new meaning. In Floating Worlds, Moneyhun designs an aspirational inverse where feminist mystique—eventually, always—materializes from the shadowy waters as women are empowered by the hybrid forms they assume.
Hiromi Moneyhun’s Floating Worlds at FIU, 2025, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.
For America, the Edo period coincided with the opening of trade routes to China in the 1780s, followed by Japan in the 1850s. Ukiyo-e prints picturing classically beautiful women in traditional roles, Kabuki actors, folk heroes, landscapes, and even erotica were mainstream in Japan and beyond, but the discerning Western customer sought East Asian porcelain and lacquerware decorated with the motifs of Japonisme and Chinoiserie. The quaint, bucolic lifestyles they portrayed, emphasized in letters from romanticized accounts of travel by transient dealers and sheltered missionaries who misunderstood the Chinese and Japanese as people who needed civilizing, predisposed a multitude of friends and relatives back home. However misleading, the “exotic” wares arriving in droves by ship from distant shores were irresistible.
“Ubiquitous luxuries in the home, they were rarely tied to the human hands that labored to produce them in China,” explains Iris Moon in the exhibition catalog for Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York earlier this year. “Instead, Chinoiserie was associated with superficial beauty made for consumption elsewhere.” Other East Asian exports from Korea and especially Japan through Japonisme aesthetic met the same imbalanced power dynamics in the West. In Elle Decor’s “It’s Time to Rethink Chinoiserie (2021),” first-generation interior designer and Korean-American Young Huh considers, “It’s one thing to admire from afar and purchase products as equals—such as buying an Hermès bag… It’s another thing if you are in a position of power looking down at the cultures that you’re replicating… Yes, Chinoiserie is nostalgic. But who and what is it nostalgic for?” For these historic East Asian styles, currently experiencing another rise in popularity due to the Maximalist and “Dopamine Dressing” movements en vogue on social media, I think the answer for some is orthodox gender roles and the white gaze.
Mermaid, Doccia Porcelain Manufactory, Italy, c. 1750 in Monstrous Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 2025, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.
Moneyhun claims no place in a particular narrative other than her own, but it’s difficult to ignore
the ideological similarities between Moneyhun’s gothic environment and the growing awareness of cultural appropriation’s lingering damage thanks to the research of curators, historians, and artists exploring the subject today. “Some 500 years ago,… European-made vases, plates, and teacups [à la Chinoiserie] depicted invented visions of the East that were colorful, intricate, and sometimes grotesque [and unnatural], especially when featuring depictions of Asian women,” provides Vogue writer Lisa Wong Macabasco in her review of Monstrous Beauty. Furthermore, in a 2025 Curationist article about the “intense sociality” of the night’s timescape in both Rājput and Edo arts, author Chrystel Oloukoï examines the Net Fishing at Night on the Sumida River triptych (c. 1800) by Kitagawa Utamaro. “Two worlds collide: that of the fishermen whose net frames the scene, and that of the courtesans of the nearby licensed brothel district, Yoshiwara. The prominent net seems to ensnare fish and courtesans alike.” The courtesans’ comparison to fish and the enigmatic romance of nighttime underpin Monstrous Beauty’s linking of East Asia, women, the ocean, and bodily mutation.
Regionally, Asian-American artist Elena Øhlander, also in Jacksonville, paints watercolors such as A Talisman Against Evil (2025) where two women face each other, wrapped in braided ropes with tassels on the ends, invoking a sense of magic. Øhlander has physiologically merged other human figures with children’s toys, takeout boxes, a cat, white and blue porcelain, and even an octopus. In Search Not the Wound Too Deep Lest Thou Make a New One (2024), a head eerily bobs in a ceramic hot pot bearing the image of Mt. Fuji, the Pacific Ocean just out of view as the bowl curves. Mixed media artist Jiha Moon, born in South Korea and currently living in Tallahassee, blends porcelain, fabric, hair, wire, beads, and other found objects to create norigae, or a type of lucky charm, that appear as abstracted women’s faces floating above indiscernible swathes of fiber. The common coastal geography of Moneyhun, Øhlander, Moon, and even the early East Asian craftspeople in Monstrous Beauty gives transcendent agency to the mystery of water and credibility to unapologetic feminism in the “freak.”
A Talisman Against Evil by Elena Øhlander, 2025, photo courtesy the artist.
Search Not the Wound Too Deep Lest Thou Make a New One by Elena Øhlander, 2024, photo courtesy the artist.]
Moneyhun works from a home studio in a winsome bungalow on Jacksonville Beach. Having crossed an ocean to the United States in 2004 and married a Jacksonville native, the artist and her spouse Roy live in his ambient 1940s family home just two blocks from the Atlantic—the only American home she’s ever known. Upon entry, it’s visually warm and slightly dim with no harsh overhead lighting. Just inside the door, shoes are casually shrugged off, and the faint scent of green tea strengthens towards the living room, where a lovely furniture collection by Roy, an avid woodworker, hints at Japanese minimalism. Moneyhun’s art covers most surfaces, from walls and tabletops to textiles and books, her artistic disposition harkening to childhood in her home country, where kirie, or “cut paper,” is a popular craft activity. In 2010, she began revisiting kirie more frequently as a form of self-care in adulthood while nursing her sick mother-in-law. With her young daughter as muse, Moneyhun unintentionally launched an art career busying her hands and mind in the quiet hours and long nights of keeping vigil.
Inside Moneyhun’s home, 2025, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.
Over time, Moneyhun’s striking talent attracted savvy mentorship and patronage, securing her placement in some early group shows. She was one of only four artists highlighted by Huffington Post out of the 100-plus featured in the State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now exhibition organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2014. According to her portfolio, “she was [also] selected as a finalist of the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art and completed a celebrated diorama, Florida in Stereo, at the St. Petersburg Museum in 2021.” And Ben Thompson, the Deputy Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Jacksonville who noticed her star power, helped to realize Moneyhun’s years-long dream of fabricating the seasonal large-scale
MOCA Atrium installation Yūrei (Ghosts) in 2023, a staple of the region’s art scene.
Inside Moneyhun’s home studio, 2025, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.
Moneyhun’s studio is compact but efficient: rolls of neutral-colored papers stand upright in a corner, cutting instruments and measurement tools hang on the wall, stacks of sketches and mat boards lean on the floor, paints and books and figurines fill built-in shelves, and the beginnings of the artist’s next series on the metamorphosis of caterpillars (grotesque, restricted) into butterflies (exquisite, free) cover a drawing table by the window. Remnants of Moneyhun’s colossal MOCA Atrium installation reveal a magnified peek into the artist’s creative and technical processes—hardy black-painted Tyvek woven with wire to create shape and structure. However, her unique compositions, months in the making, comprise line drawings turned hand-cut shapes from one solid sheet of cotton-based paper with a supporting layer underneath, primarily black on white. Moneyhun has described the disciplined nature of her work as compulsive and a daily practice she “can’t stop,” inseparable from her personhood. Vignettes inspired by the temples, customs, and people of her Japanese youth pop into her head without prompt, establishing the framework for her next masterpiece.
Inside Moneyhun’s home studio, 2025, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.
Turning the corner into Floating Worlds at FIU, one is instantly immersed in the easy discretion of Moneyhun’s sovereign nighttime by dark walls, not unlike Utamaro’s dim cover in Net Fishing at Night. The series “UKIYO” surrounds the viewer in the first gallery, ethereal bijin-ga, or “beautiful women,” in Moneyhun’s typical black cut paper “floating” on five-by-seven-feet white sheets of paper. (Importantly, the curators have placed helpful text panels throughout the exhibition to translate relevant Japanese words into English.) “Frequently in states of transformation: becoming water, unfolding as origami mirror images of themselves, or appearing as animal-human or even bonsai-human hybrids,” explains a text panel in the gallery, the Japanese courtesan and her dichotomous pleasure-pain existence centers Moneyhun’s interpretation of the ukiyo-e genre. The courtesans’ sheer scale and superhuman qualities illustrate an organic force that demands wonder, setting the tone for the whole exhibition.
Ocean by Moneyhun, 2012, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.
In Ocean (2012), intricate black lines trace the shapes of waves, coral, fish, and other marine life as they meander around two sets of Janus-headed women stacked vertically, one facing inward toward the center, the other outward at the top like the finial of a lamp. The women wear traditional Japanese coiffures and hair pins with a nod to coordinating dress and patterns. Perhaps most remarkable is the pedestal of Okobo sandals, whose high, thick wooden soles elevate apprentice geishas and confine them to walk in a fashion that promotes graceful movement. Against a white background, the amalgamation is accentuated by a third tone of gray created by the cut paper’s shadow, a dizzying effect when multiplicity and low light are already at play. Here, “beauty is both cultivated and endured, pointing to the labor and [suffering] often required to maintain such ideals,” proposes a nearby text panel, and consent is obscure in its absence. While their power simmers beneath the surface, the women in “UKIYO” are compact, self-contained, and moored to a conventional way of life.
Details, Ocean by Moneyhun, 2012, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.
In the next gallery, the series “SHIBARI” deviates in medium and fills almost an entire wall with
six wooden panels of varying shapes—a circle, crescent, triangle, square, and others—depicting
synthetic paper bonsai trees in different positions. Moneyhun admittedly once found the contrast of black and white too drastic. Although she’s made her peace with that palette, her favorite combination has always been white on natural wood grain because the lines are more blurred; you must look closer. Shibari means “to bind” and is associated with, more historically, the samurai rope technique of tying up prisoners and, more recently, a benign art form through performance and photography. Drawing a parallel between the storied rituals of shibari and bonsai pruning through their shared attributes of tension, control, and manipulation, Moneyhun subtly infuses the trees with faces, tendrils of hair, hands, legs, and feet, reminding the viewer of the human allegory of the bonsai. Bonsai 6 (2023) also features a rare appearance of kinpaku, or “gold leaf,” an optically balancing symbol of strength and element of sophistication that, in this
circular context, stands in for a full moon, not the sun for which it’s often mistaken.
“SHIBARI” series by Moneyhun, 2023, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.
Bonsai 6 by Moneyhun, 2023, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.]
On neighboring walls, works from the “EMERGENCE” series gesture toward an air of autonomy for the women they include, intertwined with components of traditional architecture that represent the religious and bureaucratic systems that have long repressed women, yet breaking free from the compositional boundaries seen in the cocoons of “UKIYO” through elements of nature, hair and dress (or the lack thereof), bodily placement, and the embrace of hybridity. Besides the endearing presence of the cat in Komo Jinjya (2022), the foxes in Fushimi Inari (2021), and the deer in Suwa Taisha (2022), the fusion of animal and human within the temple structures (note especially the fox ears and the Western nobility-style collar on the woman in Fushimi Inari) further develops the visual and spiritual weight of our beguiling “monsters.” Before the final series in the next gallery, Matsumoto Castle (2021) bookends the exhibition with independence: unclothed women, stripped of the demands of society, literally burst forth from the buildings they inhabit. Arms and legs “emerge” from windows and overhanging eaves, a full, gold moon remains steady and strong above the spectacle.
Fushimi Inari by Moneyhun, 2021, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.]
Matsumoto Castle by Moneyhun, 2021, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.]
In the final gallery, the series “YŪREI” is a step into the underworld, so to speak, where the medium is white cut paper, rather than black, offering a perceptible difference in mood that lends well to the conclusion of the exhibition, however unresolved it may be. Pivoting from courtesans and secular themes, yūrei, meaning “faint spirit,” represent ghosts in Japanese visual culture, and Moneyhun uses them here to point to her final frontier of bondage: the failed environment on the brink of no return at the hands of human negligence. These works “[introduce] a sense of instability—a world caught between decline and the potential for recovery…preventing these spirits from finding rest,” describes a corresponding text panel. For example, YŪREI #3 (2025) comprises a haunting figure swathed in knotted hair and draped over the frame of a wooden shoji door—a prop among Moneyhun’s newer artistic concepts—that is reminiscent of caught sea creatures in commercial fishing nets. Yet it’s also difficult to ignore the relationship to the similarly “caught” women in the previous rooms. YŪREI #4 (2025), a towering ceiling-to-floor spirit in white with prodigious, flowing locks, leaves us with a larger-than-life impression of the artist’s creative footprint, personal values, and pride of heritage with a leveling critique of some Japanese traditions that hinder select members of society and nonmaterialistic ideologies. Moneyhun is one of a few heritage-conscious artists now redefining power in the stereotypes, reclaiming them as a benefit, and challenging viewers to process the complex dichotomy of cultural appropriation and its harms alongside the beauty in the cross-cultural exchange.
YŪREI #3 by Moneyhun, 2025, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.
YŪREI #4 by Moneyhun, 2025, photo by Elaine Slayton Akin.