Mina Cheon: North South Korea Koreas
Past exhibition
Installation Views
Overview
Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center is pleased to present a solo show by Mina Cheon (aka Kim Il Soon): North South Korea Koreas: AI Intervention.
With this series of work, Kim Il Soon uses machine learning and AI to create a sequence of canvases depicting landscapes of both North and South Korea. Rather than the literal collective unconscious, she uses technology to explore concepts of unification through the ubiquitous collective of the World Wide Web. Taking the sequencing of AI into physical form, her works embolden themselves by performing what the machines can not.
Mina Cheon (천민정) (b. 1973, Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in Baltimore, New York, and Seoul)
Mina Cheon is a new media artist, scholar, educator, and activist best known for her “Polipop” paintings inspired by pop art and social realism. Cheon’s practice draws inspiration from the partition of the Korean Peninsula, exemplified by her parallel body of work created under her North Korean alter ego, Kim Il Soon, in which she enlists a range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video, installation, and performance to deconstruct and reconcile the precarious history — and ongoing coexistence — between North and South Korea. She has exhibited internationally, including at the Inaugural Asia Society Triennial (2020-2021); Busan Biennale (2018); Baltimore Museum of Art (2018); American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC (2014); Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul (2012); and Insa Art Space, Seoul (2005). Her work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton; and Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul. Mina Cheon’s solo exhibitions include those at the Ethan Cohen Gallery (2014, 2017-18, 2020-2021), the Lance Fung Gallery (2002), and The Korea Society (2021) in New York; the Noyes Museum of Art of Stockton University in New Jersey (2018); the Trunk Gallery (2014), Sungkok Art Museum (2012), and Insa Art Space (2004-5) in Seoul, Korea; and the Maryland Art Place (2012) and C. Grimaldis Gallery (2008) in Baltimore. Currently an Associate Dean, Undergraduate Studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Cheon has been a full-time professor at MICA since 2004. Under the guidance of dissertation advisor Avital Ronell, she received her PhD in Philosophy of Media and Communications from the European Graduate School, European University for Interdisciplinary Studies, Switzerland, and adapted her dissertation into a book, Shamanism + Cyberspace (Dresden and New York: Atropos Press, 2009). She also received her MFA in Imaging Digital Arts from UMBC: An Honors University in Maryland; an MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting, MICA; and a BFA in painting from Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea.
Cheon currently has a solo exhibition at the American University Museum, titled ‘Haunted Koreas’.
Virtual Exhibition
