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Korean born artist Mina Cheon's art practice while varied in form is consistent in concern. She focus's on the struggles inherent in socio-political constructs. Mining her own experience as a Korean born citizen who spends more than two thirds of the year in the United Sates—she is married to a U.S. citizen, the well known Baltimore architect Gabriel Kroiz with who she has two children and teaches at the Maryland School College of Art—Cheon points out the odd disconnects between the rhetorical banter of the power brokers and individuals involved in maintaining the multi-layered allusions of “country” and “self”.
Her recent exhibition Addressing Dolls, s full of her trademark humor and political pathos. Her presentation of a wall of 99 fem-bot dolls, created in mass in South Korea and dressed up in Korean Military gear of the artists design is like a coy toy-r-us display for the uber nationalistic North Korea. Placed in tubes sitting amidst a sea of “commie red” paint, the wall of dolls, all named Lil Kim (a pop culture reference to the bizarro cinema buff one time western-playboy dictator of the North and the comically tough NY rap queen) evokes the dangerous desire for perfection and taste for propaganda that exists on both sides of the North and South Korean conflict. This work, created in 2005 and exhibited in South Korea was considered somewhat scandalous. To augment the wall of Kims, Cheon has added a new series completed in 2008. All beautifully printed in large format, the series of paper dolls are of the same type the artist played with as a child in South Korea. Through the dresses, all highly western design, she shows how during the nineteen seventies western capitalistic popular cultural was used to indoctrinate the next generation of Koreans who today, like much of the world, find themselves enmeshed in the ways of the West. Cheon does not overtly pronounce this good or bad but to seems to embody and reflect the changes. But considered in context, particularly when one reads the continuing political rhetoric engaged in by all governments involved in the on going Korean so called “conflict” her work, while beautiful and humorous, lays bare the dark inherent lie incased in the simplistic and dangerous notions of all the hideous patriotism used to control and demonize the “other” no matter from where the gaze and salute occurs.
—Jack Livingston
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