Mina Cheon
Mina Cheon (천민정 PhD, MFA), a Full-time Professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), is a global Korean new media artist, scholar, and educator who exhibits her political pop art known as “Polipop” internationally. She draws inspiration from global media and popular culture to produce work that intersects politics and pop art in evocative ways. While she creates work that ranges in medium from new media, video, installation, performance, and public projects to traditional media of painting and sculptures, the content of the work is in historic alignment to appropriation art and global activism art and she works on North Korean awareness and global peace projects. Cheon’s specific focus on East-Asia reflects the transgenerational trauma of Korea’s history, of its division and war and of Japanese colonization. Having parents originate from the North and herself part of the Korean global diaspora, Cheon’s art results from a life-time of working with a cultural comparative lens and understanding Asia through its power relations with the world. Cheon has exhibited her work and/or in the collection of the Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul Olympic Museum, American University Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland Art Place Contemporary Art Center, Insa Art Space Korean Arts Council, C.Grimaldis Gallery, Lance Fung Gallery, Trunk Gallery, and represented by Ethan Cohen Gallery. Cheon is the author of Shamanism Cyberspace (Atropos Press, Dresden and New York, 2009), contributor for ArtUS, Wolgan Misool, New York Arts Magazine, Artist Organized Art, and served on the Board of Directors of the New Media Caucus of the College Art Association, as well as an Associate Editor of the peer review academic journal Media-N. Reviews for Media-N include critical essays covering SeMA Mediacity Seoul Biennale 2016 and the Venice Biennale 2017. Awarded the 2010 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Unity Week Award for her efforts promoting cultural diversity within and beyond her college, she is a Full-time Professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)
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Books by Mina Cheon
SHAMANISM + CYBERSPACE (2009) is her first book, adapted from her dissertation, The Shaeman in Cyberspace: Dilemmas of Reproduction (2008), which was completed for her doctoral degree in Philosophy of Media and Communications at the European Graduate School (EGS), Switzerland.
Papers by Mina Cheon
WOKE New Media – Borders and Bodies
Today, we are facing micro and macro aggressions of threats of “The Wall” at global and local scales, affecting all human bodies. We drown in the media war on Trump’s victory wall between the Mexican and US border; the post-internet wireless world turns out to be less than borderless as exemplified with China’s Great Firewall as an erected government surveillance; cold war tensions continue regardless of the collapse of the Berlin Wall; and nobody really cares about North Korea as long as the DMZ reinforces the splitting world power-relations. Moreover, Brexit is about leaving the European Union to deface the monetary burden of the Syrian refugee crisis, while more border-patrolled walls keep millions of Middle Eastern and African refugees from entering Europe. Every nation-state borderline contours a separation to prop up naturalized citizens, whereas undocumented bodies are systematically left in the gutter. Walls and borders displace bodies, and every neighborhood, block, or fence strategically borders off the “others.” The New Media Caucus (NMC) Diversity Panel, comprised of artists who use new media in their work, demonstrate artistic responses for countering scattered hegemonies, walls, borders in our world of increasing cultural, ideological, political, economic divisions. This is what diversity looks like in WOKE New Media.
The panel was reviewed in VOA NEWS Voice of America Korean, by Reporter Yanghee Jang: https://www.voakorea.com/korea/korea-social-issues/5120212
Panel proceedings publication: https://www.newmediacaucus.org/woke-new-media/
Contents:
Preface - Paul Catanese
Introduction & "Dreaming Unifications, Eating Choco-Pies, Walk for Peace and Information Media Presentation into North Korea" - Mina Cheon
"Counter-Surveillance Tactics: Staying Woke in Public Space" - Christopher Kojzar
"The Language of the Immigrant: How Does the Acculturated Body Become a Culture-Maker?" - Victor FM Torres
"A Will to Be" - Allana Clarke
"The Social Science of Portraiture: Reworking W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Exhibition of American Negroes" - Antonio McAfee
"Archives Aflame" - Kei Ito & Andrew Paul Keiper
"Body Controlled" & Conclusion - Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead
The extended version is in English, titled "Reporting the Future with New Media Art: SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul" and published in Media-N, Journal of New Media Caucus, 2017.
ABSTRACT
The panel investigates the relationship between magic and media in the age of new media culture. From freak (reality) shows, horror flicks and the scholarship of vampirism to new-agey re-creations of religious cults, on-line spiritual healing and pop-star worship, we live in an age where the often-separated realms of magic and media intersect in phantasmagoric ways, exposing fragments of our chaotic humanity, cultural diversity and limbo existence. The panelists are gathered for their distinctive interpretation of new media culture, while the panel charts an arc of psychoanalysis as a way to newly define the relationship between magic and media.
This exhibition is sectioned into three parts; heavens, earth, and the underground. In the heavens, we see the rise and descent of Umma from the legendary North Korean Baeksdusan Mountain. On Earth, we see Happyland Games, a series of enlarged games referencing Cheon’s earlier work with Choco·Pies, that viewers are invited to play with. And in the underground, we find 10 Notel players running the videos of contemporary art history lessons that are currently being sent into North Korea. Throughout the show, we also see Umma’s dream paintings of abstraction and Korean unification, ideas and desires that only manifest within the unconsciousness. Through this arrangement of digital photos, paintings, video, and sculptural works, we are invited to dwell in a space of potentiality, considering the artist’s concrete political gesture as well as the symbolic power inherent in the representation of the action. In this conversation, Mina and I unpack and consider the ideas this exhibition presents: the politics of visibility, collaboration, culturally specific content, representation, and motherly love. (Kimi Hanauer)
The recent war of words between North Korean and US leaders has only hardened the people’s attitudes to demagogue Father figures. With this exhibition, Cheon establishes the personality cult of UMMA (‘mommy’ in Korean), whose maternal love is deployed as the only acceptable solution for global peace and Korean unification. Whereas South Korea’s modernity was pushed forward by a chima baram (skirt wind), UMMA’s matriarchal strength is offered as a catalyst for developing North Korea. In this exhibition, Cheon (in the guise of her alter ego Kilm Il Soon, the ‘Umma of Unification’) sends motherly love and education to her children in the Hermit Kingdom and the USA. In addition, she debuts artworks resulting from a series of dissident dreams.
MINA CHEON aka KIM IL SOON Solo Exhibition
UMMA : MASS GAMES – Motherly Love North Korea
October 20 - December 10, 2017 (Extended till January 11, 2018)
Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York
251 W. 19th Street NY, NY 10011
First Published on Artist Organized Art
SWEET ♥REVOLUTION
Mina Cheon Dictation Kim Il Soon
January 17, 2014
On my mother’s birthday.
As a Korean, the idea of having two artistic identities, South Korean Mina Cheon and North Korean Kim Il Soon, is an obvious reflection on the country’s state of being divided. It makes all the sense in the world that if a country is split so should the artist in practice. As a political pop artist, I’ve created artworks that responded to the global political climate, using pop imagery that circulates on the Internet, news, and entertainment as the source of my work. As a South Korean new media artist Mina Cheon, the political pop art (Polipop) includes the perspective of a South Korean-American who travels between the East and West, bringing out things that usually go unnoticed or said in media culture. As a North Korean social realist painter, Kim Il Soon lacks access to technology and adheres strictly to the propaganda painting style of North Korea.
Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul, South Korea : January 13 – March 11, 2012
Korean-American new media artist Mina Cheon showcases POLIPOP (Political Pop Art) at the Sungkok Art Museum in Seoul, the first of three installments of Cheon’s consecutive solo-exhibitions to be held in 2012. After Seoul, Polipop projects will show at the Maryland Art Place in Baltimore and working towards showing at White Box in New York City. Polipop is a compilation of artistic research that intersects politics and pop art that looks at contested spaces and geopolitics of global media culture. Through a postcolonial perspective, Cheon instigates the relationship between the East and West, as well as the relationship between Asian countries such as South and North Korea, and Korea, Japan, and China. As once occurred with Chairman Mao, today’s plethora of images of President Barack Obama are political pop, hence Cheon highlights Obama as the polipop icon of our time. Cheon dedicates a gallery in the museum to him, thematically dividing the show into three large themes that reflect today’s political pop culture. The museum show includes the Obama Room, the Dokdo Room, and the Diamond Room. From the iconic American President and the War in the Middle East to the rise of the Asian Century and circulation of global media, the exhibition includes artworks on Obama, race, pop culture, technology, and capitalism.
Cheon’s Polipop includes more than 50 new pieces. There are over 40 new 8x5 feet digital paintings that look like propaganda banners gone pop art; animation of Obama dancing to Ally McBeal’s dancing baby “Ooga Chaka” song; video installation of traveling to Dokdo island, the contested island that sits between Korea and Japan, both physically by boat and virtually through Google Earth, Second Life, and Dokdo Internet virtual tours; and a mirrored room of massive light installation in the shape of diamonds. Image a Day: Occupy 2011 is an installation made of digital photo frames which rotates 365 images selected from the Internet (one image per day) to document global events all throughout 2011. In a glance, 2011 begins with the up rise in Egypt and ends with Occupy Demonstrations all over the world, with some other media worthy events such as the British Royal Wedding, Japan’s Tsunami and nuclear crisis, on-going global natural disasters, and the passing of Steve Jobs and Kim Jong-il.
The POLIPOP exhibition full colored 170-page catalog include writings from the Sungkok Art Museum’s chief curator Tcheon-nahm Park; art historian and scholar on race and culture, Leslie King-Hammond; cyber-feminist scholar Irina Aristarkhova; and cultural critic Pamela Haag.
Cheon’s interest in political pop art began in 2004 when she visited the North Korea’s Mt. Kumkangsan and made artwork about the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and continued as she traveled to Japan during the 2008 Summer Olympics in China specifically to interview Japanese people what they thought of the Olympics in Beijing, and highlighted while traveling to Doko in 2009. Cheon’s past solo exhibitions include showing at the Lance Fung Gallery in New York (2002), Insa Art Space, Arts Council, Seoul (2005), and at the C.Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore (2008). Previous projects include looking at the triangular relationship between South and North Korea and America and focused on North Korean woman, such as in the interactive media installation Half Moon Eyes. Cheon’s doll installation 99 Miss Kim(s) and series of prints Dresses for Different Events highlight the North and South Korean conflict portrayed in girls’ playthings, everyday objects, and products of mass media.
KenKanRyu (The Hate Korea Wave): Images of Hatred and Racism in Japanese Manga
As an artist research paper, the paper looks at images of racism and hatred found in popular culture and media of Asia. Mass media and the Internet have contributed to racial hierarchy and prejudice that are laden amongst neighboring Asian countries and this paper looks specifically at Japanese manga Kenkanry that has to do with the hatred of Korea. While the book first came out as a web comic on the Internet, it is now a cultural icon and one of Japan’s best sellers. The presentation seeks to convey how techno-Orientalism exists in cyber culture and how media has contributed to nationalism bent imperialism in Asian countries. (Mina Cheon)
Jennifer Byun, Sujung Chang, Yeeun Chung, Julia (Ju Young) Han, Chen-Chih Huang, Iuan-Ping Jau, Joowon Jeon, Yeojin Kim, and Hana Lee individually gravitated towards writing about one exhibition over another or focused on one artist versus another, and highlighted their own values as artists and non-artists, and included their cultural critique as a way to further their insight about the contemporary art scene of Seoul that reflects the staging of Seoul to the world.
The major works we see in this month and that the students write about range from blockbuster international shows such as the first Asian exhibition “Double” by Felix Gonzalez-Torres at Plateau (June 21 – September 28) and the Nam June Paik’s 80th Anniversary exhibition “Nam June Paik Spectrum” at the Seoul Olympic Museum of Art (July 6 – September 16) to a more local and intimate Korean shows such as “Hidden Track” curated by Sung Won Kim at the Seoul Museum of Art and interactive art installation group show “Doing” at the Kumho Art Museum. As overarching themes that surrounded July’s art in Seoul, there seemed to be a great interest in the possibility of interactivity in art, curators working as the new artists of our time, and democratization of thought processes in art and culture. Certainly, the larger framing was that Seoul is at its height for being contemporaneous and leading in the global art scene, and that the general public likes art. Many people are attending exhibitions in Seoul. (Mina Cheon)
Through the collaboration, participating students developed group projects as well as pushing through their own individual creative works, all of them, paying particular attention to producing work that had public relevance, and creating art as public intervention. With the diverse group of students, the public projects created were those that intersected between their fields of knowledge, between fine arts, design, and architecture, and resulted in various expressions of public installations, temporary installations, performances, events, new media work, social sculpture, and social interactions. The projects were born from pure laboratory style of arts education in that the collaborative efforts and intercultural dynamics determined the outcome of the projects for the public. Both faculty and students were active participants in the melting pot of intercultural exchange. The works that came out were spirited by the synergy of the exchange, yet reflective of the global time that we live in, and directly tied to the space of Seoul, S. Korea.
Culture Bank and the Art in Embassy program supported some of the works that came out of the projects and made lasting connections for those who were participant to its events. The book was co-authored by Mina Cheon and Gabriel Kroiz.
Participants to "COMBAT: SPORTS + MILITARY" 2010 (Directors, Students, Visiting Critics):
Mina Cheon
Gabriel Kroiz
Wendy Tai
Andrew Pisacane
Colin Van Winkle
Garrett Lee
Melissa Crisco
Clementine InHye Jang
EunYoung Lily Ko
Meen Choi
Christiana Duncan August
Nyasha Felder
YeIn Son
DaEun Lee
EeJin Choi
SinYoung Park
Ram Lee
EunJi Lee
SooHyung Chung
SuYoung Han
SoHyeong Lee
WonSun Choi
YeaWon Choi
HaYeong Yi
JiHyeon Kim
JaeEun Kim
YoonSu Lee
SunMyung Choi
Joshua Selman
Annet Couwenberg
Joo Hwang