Yong Soon Min, a Korean American artist whose work explored Asian identity in diaspora, died on Tuesday at 70 in her home in Los Angeles. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where Min was on the artist advisory council, announced her passing on Wednesday.
ICA LA director Anne Ellegood said in a statement, “We are extremely grateful for Yong Soon’s years of service to ICA LA … for contributing her wisdom, generosity, and collaborative spirit. She will be missed by so many. We are honored to have her work currently on view, which reflects her invaluable contributions to vital discourses on identity in our field over several decades and toward uplifting generations of artists in our community.”
Min formed a node within multiple networks of Asian American artists on both sides of the US. She was a member of the Godzilla Asian American Arts Network, which during the ’90s agitated for greater visibility for artists from their community, and was more recently active with GYOPO, which describes itself as a “collective of diasporic Korean cultural producers and arts professionals.”
In her own art, Min addressed her position as an artist born in Asia and based in the United States. For her 1989 work Make Me, she photographed herself and split each image in two, cutting out words such as “EXOTIC” and “IMMIGRANT.” That work figured in the New Museum portion of the legendary 1990 exhibition “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s,” which was also staged at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and is now recognized as prescient for its emphasis on race, gender, class, and sexuality.
These complex overlays were made more literal for her 1992 series “Defining Moments,” for which Min once again photographed herself, filling her form with images of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a…
Read the full article here
