Yong Soon Min (1953–2024)

Korean American artist, activist, educator, and curator Yong Soon Min, whose work explored Asian American identity, politics, and culture, died on March 12 at her home in Los Angeles. She was seventy.Newsof her death was announced the following day by the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Los Angeles. Min was a member of the Seoro Korean Cultural Network and the Godzilla Asian American Arts Network, two pathbreaking New York-based artists’ groups that in the early 1990s sought to elevate the profile of Asian American artists.

Yong Soon Min was born in 1953 in the village of Bugok, in southeastern Korea, the year the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, establishing the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. At the age of seven, she emigrated to the United States with her mother and brother, joining her father in Monterey, California. She obtained her BFA, MA, and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, before moving to New York in 1981, where she participated in the Whitney Museum of Art’s Independent Study Program. She later described herself as “cutting her political teeth” in the city, after obtaining, through a chance referral from a friend, the position of administrative coordinator at the Asian American Arts Alliance, which at the time was run out of a commercial printing business in the Meatpacking District. “I had to walk through carcasses to my office, which consisted of a desk and filing cabinet that were constantly being moved around,” she recalled.

Min worked for the organization from 1985 to 1986, during which time it broadened its focus from arts to activism. The shift led Min to realize “how little representation of women existed in the arts and likewise that there was virtually no representation of Asian American artists.” The revelation affected her own work. Her first exhibition, 1986’s “Half Home,” found her investigating Asian American identity and her work’s relation to politically active Korean American communities. She continued to explore these and similar avenues through works incorporating words and images, often layered over one another and variously rendered reflective and transparent through the use of mirrors, glass, lights, and double exposure. Perhaps the best known of these works isMake Me, 1989, a four-part suite of bifurcated black-and-white self-portraits overlaid with racialized texts such as “Model Minority” and “Objectified Other.”Make Mewas included in the trailblazing 1990 exhibition “The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s,” at the New York’s New Museum; the show was co-organized with and additionally mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Other notable works by Min includeWhirl War, 1987;“Defining Moments,”1992;DMZ XING,1994; andBridge of No Return, 1997.

Early in the 1990s, Min joined both Godzilla and Seoro, the latter of which mounted the pioneering 1993 exhibition “Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art” at the Queens Museum. Min later in the decade moved back to the West Coast with her husband, Kenyan-born photographer Allan deSouza (the two were no longer married at the time of her death). In 2011, she suffered an arteriovenous malformation (AVM), a rare type of brain hemorrhage that altered her perception of language. Min explored the experience in her 2016 exhibition “AVM: After Venus (Mal)formation” at the gallery Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles.

Min’s work has been presented in numerous institutions and venues around the world, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Asia Society, Bronx Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, and Queens Museum, all in New York; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; Kumho Museum, Seoul, and Seoul Museum of Art;  two iterations of the Havana Biennial; the Gwangju Biennale; and the Guangzhou Triennial.

Apart from her work as an artist, Min was a well-regarded curator, notably organizing“THERE: Sites of Korean Diaspora,” at the Fourth Gwangju Biennale in 2002. She cocurated, with Catherine Lord, “Memories of Overdevelopment: Contemporary Art in the Philippine Diaspora”(1996)at University Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine; and, with Viet Le,“transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix” (2007–2009),at ARKO Art Center, Seoul; San Art & Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; University Art Gallery, UC Irvine; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Additionally, she served on the artists board of the ICA Los Angeles, and on the board of directors of the Asian American Arts Alliance, among other entities. She was professor emerita at UC Irvine.

Min’s work is on view in “Godzilla: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network,” Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, through March 16. Her series “Defining Moments” is on view in “Scratching at the Moon,” ICA Los Angeles, through May 12.