BmoreArt

Cheon was born in 1973 in Seoul, two decades after the end of the US-backed Korean War, to parents originally from the North. Growing up, Cheon was immersed in art, culture, and travel to the West because of her cultural attaché father and art historian mother. At some point in her early career, Cheon worked alongside Fluxus artists including Nam June Paik, assisting them with international projects in South Korea such as the 1993 Fluxus Festival in Seoul and the InfoArt Pavilion of the first Gwangju Biennale in 1995.

When she moved to Baltimore to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art’s LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting MFA program after earning a BFA at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Cheon was a self-proclaimed “diehard painter,” focusing on the intersection of art and science. Under the guidance of then director Grace Hartigan who helped her to “work big and think big,” she was ambitious about what could be accomplished through painting.

“When I was in grad school, I did this project called Fifteen Billion Years of the Travelling Atom, a seventy-two-foot-long painting that was eight feet tall,” she recalls. “It was a painting about the origin of the universe, but I was interested beyond the surface and included sound and bubble machines. I was itching to go beyond 2D into environments that explored the complexities of blurred space.” In this case, Cheon wanted to question empirical scientific knowledge, which also functioned as an allegory for growing up in a country with complex and contradictory boundaries around space, identity, and nationality.

Cheon’s curiosity about digital media led her to the University of Maryland Baltimore County’s Imaging & Digital Arts program (now Intermedia & Digital Arts), where she created videos, sound art, and interactive environments, and graduated with a second MFA in 2002. “I wanted to address the space of democracy that is created when artwork is interactive,” Cheon says. “I was invested in the politics surrounding one’s choice in artistic medium and I continued to explore the theme of scientific knowledge, questioning it as a form of absolute truth, pointing out how it discounts different cultural perspectives.” The contrast between truth-telling and pluralistic worldviews led Cheon to focus more intently upon geopolitical spaces, and from there, more specifically on Korea.

After this formative education, Cheon experienced a consequential moment in her artistic development when she and her American husband, architect Gabriel Kroiz, were selected to visit North Korea in 2004 as part of a government-sanctioned tour. Although it was restricted and surveilled with camera checks and implicit governmental threats, Cheon’s interactions with North Korean people were familial. “They treated me like family and called me big sister,” she says. Cheon collected video footage which she later incorporated into the video Half Moon Eyes, 2004, offering a first-hand look into the DPRK during Kim Jong-il’s reign. Sprinkled across the twelve-minute video, various stealthily captured scenes depict North Korean acrobats, waterfalls, mountains, and tour bus footage arrayed in peripatetic sequences.

“The complexity of the relationship between North and South Korea is such a huge example of the challenges in perception that I want to represent in my work,” she says. “That trip was transformative in focusing my attention on interactive moments where the art is an interface, where I can subvert scientific theories or history or Western politics because there is no logic that makes sense.” The stories Cheon tells do not easily equate to the simplistic way that the West perceives North Korea, and it is an ongoing challenge to make this complexity palpable for viewers.

Since her venture to the so-called Hermit Kingdom, Cheon’s practice has advocated for the humanity of its denizens by highlighting commonalities across borders while exuding hope for peaceful reconciliation, despite the South’s official stance deeming the North as a perpetual foe. Influenced by the political awareness of the Minjung art movement, which began in response to the 1980 Gwangju Massacre and emphasized democracy and unification, Cheon’s best-known works may be her politically oriented Pop art paintings, referred to as “Polipop” and “DPRK Polipop.” These brightly colored paintings present a singular blend of images from Korean culture with the formal typologies of American Pop art and socialist realism, as well as the propagandistic state art promoted in North Korea.

At times, Cheon’s faux propaganda has been so convincing it has prompted South Koreans to consider her a North Korean sympathizer, while art critics have approached it as direct satire. But neither interpretation is accurate. “This work looks like state propaganda,” Cheon admits, “so some people think I am painting them on behalf of North Korea, but really I’m thinking about the spectrum of propaganda art, the nuances and omission that exist in between the obvious political messaging.” Cheon explains that it’s incredibly difficult to describe all of the subtle differences between North and South Korea, between East and West, but that she is using the language and subject matter to embed contradictory layers of information that political discourse intentionally leaves out.

For over a decade, Cheon has been making what she describes as the dream paintings of the North Korean artist Kim Il Soon—an artistic persona and alter ego à la Cindy Sherman. Wearing North Korea’s dark-green military uniform, Cheon made her first public appearance as Kim during the 2013 PULSE Art Fair, and her doppelgänger’s graffiti-meets-Yves-Klein paintings have been subsequently shown at the Korea Society in New York in 2021 and in the inaugural Asia Society Triennial 2020–2021 We Do Not Dream Alone (curated by Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe and Boon Hui Tan). “As a Korean, the idea of having two artistic identities, the South Korean Mina Cheon and North Korean Kim II Soon, is an obvious reflection of the country’s state of being divided,” she says. “It makes sense that if a country can be split, so can an artist’s practice.”

Cheon also created Video Art History Lessons by Professor Kim beginning in 2017. The series of videos on contemporary art were sent into North Korea in different media carriers through intermediaries and across the South Korean border. A mash-up of Art21-meets-Snapchat, Cheon’s lectures are likely the only information about contemporary art that many North Koreans have ever seen, groundbreaking examples of subversive cross-cultural exchange.

Reflexive to current geopolitical issues and the pandemic, Cheon’s art practice continues to evolve. She created the latest iteration of EatChocopieTogether.com digitally in 2020, in part to support organizations fighting anti-Asian violence in America during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conceived as part of the Asia Society Triennial exhibit, Cheon offered five new designs for virtual Chocopies, where a viewer can click to consume it, and then share it with a friend, accompanied by a message of care. Each digital share raised two dollars, and the proceeds, which reached $5,000 in a month, were donated to the Korean American Community Foundation COVID-19 Action Fund.

“What really motivates me is the idea of crossing over, the sending and receiving of information across barriers,” Cheon says. In her work, she strives to cultivate a nuanced understanding of what it means to be Korean, the complexity of blurred boundaries and separation, as well as the transgenerational trauma of having one’s family be divided by political violence. This crossover also occurs through her own artistic journey from painting to digital expression and performance, an indication of her desire to learn more and enact a loving exchange with others.

Though people are divided in seemingly insurmountable ways, Cheon’s prolific and often maximalist output acts as a lodestar for reconciliation, understanding, and unification. Her work reflects the dangers of political and national divides in general and specifically how Korean people—aunts, cousins, and siblings—are separated on opposite sides of the DMZ. Rather than envisioning the other side as the enemy, Cheon presents them, and herself, as kin. Cheon’s work offers proof that what we share as human beings is infinitely greater than the arbitrary political lines that divide and hold us hostage. We can all enjoy eating Chocopies together, North, South, East, and West.