Exhibition of Artwork by Yong Soon Min Explores Historic and Ongoing Impact of the Korean War

For Immediate Release
September 9, 2024 

Irvine, CA… KISSSSS by Yong Soon Min is an exhibition comprising three parts: Both Sides Now (2018), Still/Incessant (2018/2024), and KISSSSS (2024) by the late Yong Soon Min, Professor Emerita in University of California, Irvine’s (UCI) Department of Art. Featuring her final artwork, the presentation is curated by Min’s colleague and friend, Bridget R. Cooks, PhD, the Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of African American Studies and Art History at UCI. 

On view at the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery on UCI’s campus from October 5 to December 14, 2024, KISSSSS by Yong Soon Min is co-sponsored by UCI’s Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art (Langson IMCA) and Claire Trevor School of the Arts (CTSA) with lead support generously provided by UC Irvine’s Center for Critical Korean Studies and Claire Trevor Society. 

Throughout her career as an artist, activist, educator, and curator, Min (1953–2024) examined the impact of the Korean War, particularly the ongoing division of the two countries 

at the 38th parallel. KISSSSS (2024), the last project Min worked on before her death, explores how entangled geopolitical relations between North and South Korea, China, the Soviet Union, United Nations, and United States created the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that continues today. 

Although KISSSSS remains unfinished, the installation includes conceptual elements and photographs from a shoot the artist oversaw shortly before her passing. The 14 photographs in the rear gallery correspond with seven brick stations in the center of the space. On top of these stations are notes and reference material from Min’s research that trace important political events since the signing of the 1953 armistice that established the DMZ, divided the country, and thereby instantly separated families. 

These notes are key to understanding the historical timeline enacted by the characters in the photographs inspired by artist René Magritte’s painting, The Lovers (1928). Min created a contradictory sense of distance and intimacy by depicting figures kissing and embracing with flags masking their faces. She drew upon Magritte’s anonymity of the individuals and the elusiveness of intimacy while heightening the symbolic meaning of the flags and the political entanglement of the six entities they represent. 

Both Sides Now and Still/Incessant reflect Min’s continued interest in the DMZ from different perspectives. Both Sides Now are prints of collages that Min created with postcards purchased during her travels to the Joint Security Area in South Korea and North Korea in the 1990s. She spliced and reassembled the postcards to show alternating depictions of both nations simultaneously. For Still/Incessant, one collage is enlarged and installed at the back of the gallery as a mural. The mural-scale format situates viewers in the room where the armistice was signed and emphasizes the ongoing effect of the historical event still keenly felt today. This image is also the subject of the five newly produced artist books, which is Min’s last finished artwork. 

About Yong Soon Min 

Born in 1953 in a village near Seoul, South Korea, the year the Korean War ended with an armistice without peace, Yong Soon Min called herself a Cold War baby. At age seven, she immigrated with her mother and brother to join their father in Monterey, CA. After earning her BA, MA, and MFA degrees in art at UC Berkeley, Min moved to New York City during the 1980s where she earned a postdoc at Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. 

Among the grants and honors Min received are a Fulbright Senior Research Grant; COLA Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department; Korea Foundation Grant; Anonymous Was a Woman Award; Guggenheim Foundation Grant; and a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Visual Artist Award in New Genre. Significant exhibitions include The Decade 

Show; decolonization, Bronx Museum, NY; Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art, Queens Museum, NY, and Kumho Museum, Seoul; Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, Asia Society, NY and traveled; Bride of No Return solo exhibition that traveled; the 4th and 10th Havana Biennial; 7th Gwangju Biennale; 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, and exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art, NY; Smith College Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Seoul Museum of Art and Commonwealth and Council gallery. Among exhibitions she has curated are Memories of Overdevelopment: Contemporary Art in the Philippine Diaspora; THERE: Sites of Korean Diaspora for 4th Gwangju Biennale; and transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix held in Seoul, Ho Chi Minh City, Irvine, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. 

Min served on the Board of Directors of Asian American Arts Alliance, National Board of Directors of CAA; Korean American Museum; Artists Board of Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the steering committee of GYOPO.

Joining the Department of Art faculty at UCI in 1993, she was named Professor Emerita in 2014. 

About Bridget R. Cooks 

Bridget R. Cooks, PhD is a scholar and curator of American art. Her research focuses on visual art by African Americans, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. She serves as Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of African American Studies and Art History at the University of California, Irvine. She is core faculty in the PhD Programs in Visual Studies and Culture and Theory. Her books, articles, and essays can be found widely across interdisciplinary academic publications and art exhibition catalogues. She is most well-known as the author of the book, “Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum” (UMass, 2011) which received the inaugural James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History. 

Cooks’ first career was in museum education. In this capacity she worked at the Oakland Museum of California, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Cooks has curated several exhibitions including Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California at the Pasadena Museum of California Art; Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective at the California African American Museum; The Black Index (four venue national tour); Dissolve (Langson IMCA, University Art Gallery, UCI; and Lava Thomas: Homecoming at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. 

She has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships from organizations including the Ford Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, Getty Research Institute, and California Humanities. 

For information about public programs organized in conjunction with the exhibition, go here.