Yong Soon Min: Artist, Activist – ” Humanist

Yong Soon Min defies definition. Internationally renown as a multimedia artist as well as a scholar and curator, Min has been a voice and visual stimulus behind the emergence of multiculturalist and decolonial art activism in the ’80’s up to today with her latest exhibition on view at NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute titled “Exquisite Crisis and Encounters.”Yong Soon Min defies definition. Internationally renown as a multimedia artist as well as a scholar and curator, Min has been a voice and visual stimulus behind the emergence of multiculturalist and decolonial art activism in the ’80’s up to today with her latest exhibition on view at NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute titled “Exquisite Crisis and Encounters.”

I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to speak with Min about her work on a few occasions, including for the current show at NYU and recently at the University of Connecticut at Storrs for a presentation sponsored by the Asian American Studies Institute. There, standing not more than a head taller than the podium in front of the students who filled all the seats and spread onto the floor, she dominated the crowded lecture room on the vibrant campus set in the idyllic setting of Storrs. Her enthusiastic arms gestured, waving in the interest of the students as she spoke about her past and recent work.

Yong Soon Min and Allan Desouza, installation/performance, Will *** for
Peace, at Oboro Gallery in Montreal, 2003.

Min was born in 1953, the same year as the end of the U.S. and Korean War. This date is marked in one of her six photographic collage works in the series titled Defining Moments (1992). Overlapping her torso, a whirling line of dates, including 1953 and 4/29/92, the date of the L.A. Riots (Sai-i-gu), are drawn onto an image of her torso. Her body serves as the embattled territory on which these events are etched.

History and its telling and retelling in both visual imagery and words are vital to Min’s works. She points to her early piece Back of the Bus, as an example of the point in which her identity and her family’s Asian American background entered into her work. During this time in the early ’80s, Min worked with the Asian American Arts Alliance, a New York-based non-profit organization that continues to promote artists and cultivate smaller arts and cultural organizations. At this time she also joined in the activities of Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, a popular and important arts collective that sought to bring visibility to Asian American artists.

Back of the Bus is a drawing based off family a photo of her mother sitting at the back of a bus on her way to work at a coffee shop on a U.S. army base in Korea. Also on the drawing is a filmstrip-like rendition of Min’s own self portraits in small frames posed collage-like on the canvas. In this work Min investigates her relationship to her parent’s history in relation to the military, the Korean and U.S. war, and her own identity as an artist under investigation, while overlaying the piece with the double entendre motioning to Rosa Parks’ civil rights era incident that was yet to come. While Back of the Bus is more obvious in its intention, her later works couple such multiple meanings and wordplay in subtler, yet even more striking methods.

Yong Soon Min and Allan Desouza, installation/performance, Will *** for
Peace, at Oboro Gallery in Montreal, 2003.

 
Her sensibilities to decolonialist discourse in relation to Korea seeps into her work such as The Bridge of No Return (1997). The title refers to a now defunct bridge that crosses the military demarcation line between North and South Koreas. Until 1968, it was used by POWs who could choose whether they wanted to return to or remain in either countries – ” North or South – ” never to cross back. The installation, which traveled to several museums and gallery spaces in New York City, as well as in the Philippines, Canada, England and South Korea, was created by a chain link fence that separated the gallery in a serpenting yin-yang. On either side of the fence were pale pink commercial images facing one way, representing the South Korean partition; and pale blue propagandist clippings facing the other, calling forth images of the propagandist recordings at the DMZ (Korean Demilitarized Zone) emanating from North Korea.

Her installation deColonization (1991) was a direct response to a packet Min received from the U.N. that declared 1990 as the “Decade of Decolonization.” In her works for the installation, she strung out a Korean dress on which she wrote the words to a poem by Korean American poet Won Ko called “Home.” The poem alludes to colonization as not simply fixed, but instead residing within the disparate histories and selves of the individual. The piece was criticized by some, unfamiliar with her intentions, as exoticizing Korean women, but the use of the dress actually tied into how the effects of colonialization crossed existing geographically-bound territories and historically-bound timelines. For Min, the dress represented Korean women such as herself in the U.S., who remain affected by the overlay of U.S. colonization.

Yong Soon Min and Allan Desouza, installation/performance, Will *** for
Peace, at Oboro Gallery in Montreal, 2003.

Oftentimes, Min’s works and methodology are overflowing with critical race theory and decolonialist theory, pushing the discourse into new realms. For many of her exhibitions, Min has written text to accompany her work, serving in a sense as a curator for her works. As both a scholar and curator as well as artist and activist, her many roles seem to challenge the artist in her, bringing about complex projects. One such exhibition was her installation/performance XEN: Migration, Labor and Identity (2004) at Ssamzie Space in Seoul, South Korea, created with her partner Allan deSouza with whom she has created several artist happenings and artworks and exhibitions.

 
In one of the rooms of the “XEN” exhibition, Min projected her video “Moving Target,” a piece that illustrated the plight and vulnerabilities of migrant workers in Korea as they rallied in the street. In the exhibition, Min the artist is aware of her position as an outside observer and reincorporates that within the exhibition itself. Exhibition-goers are forced to mimic her position as cameraperson and interviewer by viewing the interviews of individual workers through small video camera LCD screens posed in TV set-like installations representing their workplace. Since her creation of the video installation, one also learns that one of the interviewees has also since been deported. Enveloping the spectator in her interviewing process, the subject becomes visceral and Min forces the viewer to come to terms with subjects as whole persons, that may seem far away, but are now up close and human.

Yong Soon Min

Not all of Min’s works are as somber. In her joint project Will ****For Peace (2002) with Allan deSouza at Oboro Gallery in Montreal, the couple slept in a bed in the gallery, recreating Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s famous Bed-In. Inside the gallery hung word bubbles where participants were asked to fill out the space between the words “Will **** for Peace.” Min also asked participants to cut strands of her hair, as she would later say, for “souvenirs.”

 
Yong Soon Min has curated exhibitions around the world including at the 4th Gwangju Biennale in 2002. Her work has been shown all over the world including at The Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Walker Art Center and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is a professor of Art at UC Irvine in California. “Exquisite Crisis and Encounters”, curated by Yong Soon Min, opens at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU on February 15 and runs through mid May. For more information visit www.apa.nyu.edu

Alexandra Chang is an arts writer and curator. She currently works at A/P/A Institute at NYU.