Six years in the making, the new issue of Hanna Moon’s A Nice Magazine wants to redress the idea of the ‘female gaze’
In Dorothea Tanning’s dreamlike paintings, girls transform into mythical beings, plants roam around eerie houses, and characters drift through worlds of uneasy, perpetual motion. There’s a self-portrait the American surrealist produced in 1944, however, that presents a rare moment of stillness. Standing neatly on a podium in her underwear with her back to the viewer, the artist depicts herself as a tiny figure gazing out over the expanse of a blue-tinged canyon. As she contemplates the world before her, the mood is unclear. She appears both confident, solid as a pillar; yet also fragile, perhaps overcome by the vast indifference of the universe. Like much of Tanning’s work, its magic is that the more you look, the more you see.
“I don’t know why, but that image really touched me,” says the South Korea-born photographer Hanna Moon. She first saw the painting at the Tate in 2019 as part of a landmark retrospective surveying Tanning’s seven-decade career. The sprawling show brought together over 100 paintings and sculptures alongside writing and ephemera, tracing a life spent exploring ‘unknown but knowable’ states of being. “I could sympathise with this feeling of navigating the world as a female artist. It’s fun but at the same time you can feel overwhelmed.”
Only later recognised as a pioneer, Tanning spent much of her rise in the shadow of her husband, the fellow surrealist Max Ernst, working at newspapers for years to support her practice. “In my opinion, her work is far better [than Ernst], but because it was the 1920s and she was female she didn’t get the same recognition,” says Moon. “That really hit me.” She left the exhibition strangely moved, instantly knowing she wanted to start a project about the experience of being a female artist. Six years and innumerable revisions later, it finally arrives in the form of a third issue of her self-published project, A Nice Magazine, launching tonight (Febuary 5) at the ICA in London.
Moon created the first issue of A Nice Magazine a decade ago as her final project at Central Saint Martins. Poking fun at the fashion industry, it featured sardonic ‘street style’ images of random shoppers in Westfield, nude shots of other students, and contributions from her friends, such as the artist George Rouy. “It was kind of a playground concept and a lot of silly ideas twisting what was out there already,” she explains. “Ironically, the first issue criticised i-D and Dazed, but they were really interested in it. Somehow I got jobs for Dazed because of the magazine.” The second issue was made while Moon was interning for Tyrone Lebon and included a story where she challenged the photographer to shoot the same models as her. “The idea was to see whose pictures would turn out better,” she says. “Tyrone said yes, which was funny. I think what’s mesmerising about fashion is that it’s actually really upfront, way more so than art.”
In the eight years since she last published the magazine, Moon has become an established photographer in her own right, contributing beautiful, vibrant stories to AnOther, The Gentlewoman, and Pop while shooting campaigns for brands like Gucci and Marc Jacobs. Returning to the magazine, she wanted to keep its initial “rebel spirit” and tight-knit community feeling, working with writer Moffy Gathorne Hardy, who she shot nude for the first issue. “Most of the contributors are my friends, and a lot of them already had been in previous issues,” she says. “I just love my friends’ work.”
Using Tanning’s self-portrait as a starting point, Moon wanted the project to redress the idea of the ‘female gaze’, feeling the term has become tied up with a soft, one-dimensional kind of work in recent years. “It’s not about softer looking images, but quite literally being a woman. What does that mean? That’s the sort of question I wanted to ask,” she says. “How the specific social and physical status of being a woman affects or informs someone's work.” To attempt to answer this, she turned to several women close to her, including Momo Okabe, Joyce NG, Jet Swan, Emma Wyman and Rosie Marks, inviting them to submit a story with the deceptively simple brief of a self-portrait. “But I told them it doesn’t have to be a picture of your face,” she explains. “I personally believe that any work you produce is a reflection of yourself.”
Traversing themes like bodily autonomy, friendship and sex, the magazine takes the self-portrait to surprising new conclusions. One story captures artist Cammie Toloui’s time working at a New York peep show in the 80s which, incredibly, she shot for an assignment at photography school where students were asked to document their daily lives. “Even though you don’t really see her in the images, it’s her gaze towards these men jerking off to her,” says Moon. “There’s something more powerful about that gaze.” Elsewhere, Rosie Marks captures plastic surgery tourism in Turkey, Julie Greve shoots teenage girls, and Jess Maybury transforms herself into ghoulish, mythic collages.
One of the most touching stories sees Hera Gwon document her pregnancy and early days as a single mum. “I met her when she was a photo student in Korea and she modelled for Joyce, who shot her for the first issue of A Nice Magazine,” says Moon. “She couldn't follow her photographic career because all of a sudden she had a baby. I asked her to photograph something for me. I’m really attached to these images because that wasn’t even a commission for the magazine. I just asked her to do that because I didn’t want her to stop.”
Six years in the making, the resulting project is a beautiful, vulnerable, and personal tribute to Moon’s community of women artists and their unique visions of the world. “I almost don’t want to let it go,” she says. “Every copy I sell, I will lose like 30 quid because the printing is so amazing, but I have a duty to make it beautiful because of all the people who trusted in me, gave me their work, and waited for six years. In the end, I just really had to push. I’m really proud of it, but it felt like giving birth.”
A Nice Magazine launches at the ICA in London on February 5 from 8.30 - 10pm.
