Yong Soon Min

Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts  welcomed Yong Soon Min as the 2016 spring Audain Visual Artist in Residence. In the Audain Gallery, Yong Soon Min’s video work focusing on North Korea, Bungabsubnida and On the Road: Northern Exposure, was exhibited alongside collaboratively produced projects and performances by the second and third year undergraduates in the Visual Art Program.

As a variation of our annual third year undergraduate exhibition, the Audain Gallery functioned as a hybrid pedagogical space to explore the formal, conceptual and political aspects of monuments, counter-monuments and the notion of alternative archives. Public events and informal discussions on questions concerning war, ideology, colonialism, multiculturalism and transnationalism–which Yong Soon Min has addressed over her long career–were an integral part of this project.

The second and third year students constructed and installed a (counter) monument loosely based on the Robo-Lenin from Magnitorsk (1931), which was destroyed in 1932, yet remains documented in a photograph for Life Magazine by Margaret Bourke-White. A large pedestal base related to the reclining horizontal monument served as a platform for readings and performances by the students. In addition, the students made sculptural spheres inspired by Yong Soon Min’s work. Framed by discussions concerning the hierarchies by which materials get preserved and monumentalized, students worked with texts and images that have inspired and transformed their habitual sense of the world and place these into the work as personal archives. What can we learn from the extremes of failed utopian visions as a way forward, without cynicism? This central question anchors the disparate elements.

Yong Soon Min was born near Seoul in 1953, the year the Korean War ended in Armistice. Min immigrated with her mother and brother to the U.S. in 1960 to join their father and grew up in Monterey, CA. She received her MFA degree from UC Berkeley in 1979 and a postdoc at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1981. She lives in Los Angeles and is Professor Emeritus at UC Irvine.

Min’s art practice, including national and international exhibitions and curatorial projects, engages interdisciplinary sources in the examination of issues of representation and cultural identities and the intersection of history and memory. Min has received numerous grants and awards, including recently a Fulbright Senior Research Grant, COLA Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and Korea Foundation Grant.

Events

Yong Soon Min: Dear Leader, What I Love . . .

March 24 – April 2, 2016
Audain Gallery
Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 12–5pm

Opening Reception

Audain Gallery, Wednesday, March 23, 2016, 7–9PM

SCA Students: Performances and Readings

Audain Gallery, Thursday, March 24, 1:30–4PM

Artist Talk: Young Soon Min

Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, Thursday, March 24, 7PM

Art and the Pacific Rim Legacies of War

Round table discussion with Yong Soon Min, David Khang, Cindy Mochizuki, and Ho Tam. Moderated by Jin-me Yoon.
Audain Gallery, Saturday, March 26, 1PM

Exhibition tour with SCA Students

Audain Gallery, Saturday, March 26, 3PM

Discussion with Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers

4th floor, Rm 4955, Wednesday March 30, 2:30 – 4:30PM

Presented with SFU Galleries.

Yong Soon Min, Dear Leader, What I Love . . . , installation view, Audain Gallery. Yong Soon Min and SCA Visual Arts students, 2016.