Yong Soon Min at Art in General - Brief Article

Yong Soon Min returns to New York with her special repertoire of symbolically charged materials that poetically evoke Korean history while dissecting Korean and Korean-American identity. Her new work is a complex weave of Asian diasporic reflection and memorialization replayed for us against a backdrop of geopolitical conflict and Cold War demystification.

Geohistorical reflections (lyrically enriched by images of what Min calls "Defining Moments") are at the core of her work, and are best expressed in The Bridge of No Return, a vividly metaphoric sculptural installation that symbolically invokes a historic prisoner exchange at the end of the Korean War. In this incident, captured soldiers on both sides were given the option of going to the North or South--with no hope of ever returning to the other. A freestanding, fencelike 8-foot-high structure of aluminum struts and wire mesh, the work is a snaking "S" form that invokes the spiritual concept of yin and yang. Its physical transparency allows the viewer to symbolically and simultaneously encounter the inextricably linked experiences of North and South Korea. It's a symbol of male and female, of night and day, of the interdependence of human experience. But it also references the split between people (the yin-yang icon is on the South Korean flag) as well as the cultural and metaphysical separation of Korean immigrants (and their hyphenated offspring) from the Korean nation and its bifurcated history.

The fencelike form is covered in culturally charged language fragments printed on magnetic strips and is metaphorically divided into night and day by a horizontal row of clock faces hung on both sides. Photographic images on each clock face represent a series of national Korean "defining moments." The work is ultimately a three-dimensional cultural portrait of pan-Korean sensibility and Min attempts to somehow reconcile her relationship to both the totalitarian North and the crisis-ridden, free-market republic in the South.

Min's work beautifully monitors and represents the inner life of the immigrant/expatriate. An immigrant herself, she remains focused on the intricate connections between national culture, the poetics of identity and the unpredictable, hybrid reconfigurations of the individual life caught in forced cultural dispersion.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group