Announcing Mina Cheon’s participation in the inaugural Asia Society Triennial 2020

Ethan Cohen Gallery is proud to announce Mina Cheon’s participation in the inaugural Asia Society Triennial 2020, opening June 5, that will take place in New York across multiple venues including the Asia Society Museum, Governors Island, NY Historical Society, Times Square, Lincoln Center, and more; while exhibiting a focused artist list of 40+ contemporary Asian artists from 19 countries including Xu Bing, Kimsooja, and others.

Mina Cheon aka Kim Il Soon and the premiere of her installation Eat Choco·Pie Together during the solo-exhibition, “Choco·Pie Propaganda: From North Korea with Love,” at Ethan Cohen Gallery, New York in 2014.

Titled We Do Not Dream Alone, the Asia Society Triennial is co-curated by Boon Hui Tan, Director of Asia Society Museum, and Michelle Yun, Senior Curator of Asian Contemporary Art.

“Choco·Pie Propaganda: From North Korea with Love,” at Ethan Cohen Gallery, New York in 2014.

For the Triennial presentation, hosted by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and sponsored by the Orion Co., of Korea, Mina Cheon’s signature art piece for “Korean unification,” Eat Choco·Pie Together, will be featured at the David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center as a special performative installation event of 10,000 Choco·Pies kindly donated by Orion to be installed for the audience to eat, as food and gift for art and healing, and for everyone to “take a bite for peace.” The work is also a satellite event that thematically connects to the artist’s installation The House of Unification: The Pavilion of the Koreas exhibited at Governors Island which will feature her video artworks shared in notel media players that directly relate to North Korea’s state of isolation and its internal catalyst for change through media consumption and dissemination.

Photo: Installation view of Mina Cheon aka Kim Il Soon’s Video Art History Lessons by Professor Kim in notel players exhibited during the solo-exhibition “UMMA: MASS GAMES – Motherly Love North Korea” at Ethan Cohen Gallery, New York in 2017-2018.

“Asia Society’s purview across the region and the diaspora represents diverse cultures, religions, ethnicities, political ideologies, and identities... Ultimately, we focused our selection on artists whose practices actively and uniquely engage timely, yet universally accessible, issues relating to democracy, identity, gender, and sustainability.” (Michelle Yun)

In light of the Asia Society Triennial, we are also pleased to announce Mina Cheon’s upcoming solo exhibition, “Dreaming Unification,” at Ethan Cohen Gallery opening late May 2020.

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Mina Cheon (천민정) (b. 1973, Seoul, South Korea) is a global Korean new media artist, scholar, and educator who lives and works between Baltimore, New York, and Seoul and exhibits her political pop art known as “Polipop” internationally. Being a part of the Korean diaspora, Cheon’s art results from a life-time of working with a postcolonial and comparative cultural lens and making contemporary art that is in historic alignment to appropriation art and global activism art, while focusing on North Korean awareness and global peace projects. Paralleling the Korean country’s split, Cheon also practices art as a North Korean artist “Kim Il Soon,” her art persona. Mina Cheon is represented by Ethan Cohen Gallery where she has had two solo exhibitions (2014, 2017-18) and has participated in numerous group exhibitions and art fairs. She has also exhibited her work at Sungkok Art Museum (2012) and Insa Art Space (2004-5) in Seoul, Korea and at Maryland Art Place (2012) in Baltimore. She has also exhibited her work and/or is in the collection at the Noyes Museum of Art (2018), Seoul Olympic Museum (2013), American University Museum (2014), Smith College Museum of Art (2018), Baltimore Museum of Art (2018), and participated in the 2018 Busan Biennale. Cheon is a Full-time Professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA); she received her PhD in Philosophy of Media and Communications from the European Graduate School, European University for Interdisciplinary Studies, Switzerland; MFA in Imaging Digital Arts from UMBC: An Honors University in Maryland; MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting, MICA; BFA in painting from Ewha Womans University.

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For more information, please contact Ethan Cohen Gallery. ecfa@ecfa.com (212) 625-1250

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