Mina Cheon
MICA
Mina Cheon is a Korean new media artist, scholar, and educator who lives and works in Baltimore, New York, and Seoul. She exhibits political pop art known as “Polipop” internationally. Being a part of the Korean diaspora, Cheon’s art results from a lifetime of working with a postcolonial and comparative cultural lens. She makes contemporary art that is in historic alignment to appropriation art and global activism art while focusing on North Korean awareness, Korean unification, and global peace projects. She is an invited artist to the inaugural Asia Society Triennial 2020-2021 and has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Ethan Cohen Gallery where she is represented. Mina Cheon participated in the Waterfall Gallery’s women empowerment exhibition “The Need for My Care,” curated by Doo Eun Choi and Kate Shin in 2016. As a part of the Waterfall Healing Campaign 2020, Cheon states: “To me, art can heal and help unite divided worlds, and bring peace on earth.”
Missiles Goodbye
Global warfare intensifies with demagogue Father figures at
the forefront. As a response, artist Mina Cheon establishes
a feminist leader of global peace and Korean unification
as UMMA (‘mommy’ in Korean). 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 as well. Mina Cheon aka Kim
Il Soon as the ‘Umma of Unification’ sends motherly love
and video art history education into North Korea as a form
of asynchronous communication. In addition, she debuts
artworks resulting from a series of dissident dreams.
Missiles Good Bye is a part of dreaming Korean unification
painting series, and is a portrait of the artist standing in
front a North Korean ICBM missile launch which comes
from North Korean periodical print materials. It is dipped
in custom IKB blue paint, the color that symbolizes modern
abstraction, spiritualism, and deep sleep wherefrom Kim
Il Soon taps into the collective unconsciousness for global
peace.