Art Basel: Miami Beach : Ken Gun Min

Ken Gun Min's artistic practice explores themes of identity, space, and marginalization, shaped by his experiences as a gay Asian man navigating life between Los Angeles and Seoul. His work transforms public and private spaces into richly imagined landscapes that reflect trauma, resilience, and celebration. Through lush botanical imagery, celestial motifs, and scenes featuring nude figures, Min constructs visually captivating queer utopias that address the violence faced by queer communities in urban environments.

In his recent works, Min expands his thematic and material inquiries. His large-scale paintings and intricately designed folding screens blend Western and East Asian artistic traditions, incorporating European oil techniques with Korean pigments and Japanese book-binding methods. This fusion creates delicate surfaces, enhanced by hand-embroidered glass beads and gemstones that honor traditionally feminized craft practices. His reinterpreted folding screens invite contemplation of visibility, desire, and the colonial gaze, while his portraits and landscapes explore masculinity and queer identity, highlighting the overlooked narratives within these communities and offering a nuanced interplay of beauty, violence, and subversive power.

Ken Gun Min (b. 1976, Seoul, South Korea; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) studied western painting and art history and theory at Hongik University in Seoul, Korea and received his MFA from the Academy of Art, University of San Francisco. Solo exhibitions include The Last Paradise, MCA Denver, Denver, CO; Silverlake Dog Park, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Wounded Man, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, K contemporary, Denver, CO; and Becoming Palm Tree,Gae Po Project Space, Seoul, Korea. Group exhibitions that featured Min’s work include Strings of Desire, Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles, CA; i know you are, but what am i? (De)Framing Identity and the Body, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT; Sparkle in, Fade out, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; People of the Otherworld: Ken Kiff in Dialogue, curated by Kathy Battista, Albertz Benda, New York, NY; Who is Your Master? curated by Wolf Hill, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY: Bozomag: Bozo Family Hoedown, M+B gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and 36 Paintings, Harper’s, East Hampton, NY. He was a Hopper Prize finalist and received awards from Direktorenhaus, Berlin, DE and the Kellogg Foundation, New York, NY. Min’s work has been featured in Artnet, Artsy, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Wallpaper* and Frieze.

Ken Gun Min has a forthcoming sculpture commission by the Denver Art Museum that will debut in 2025.