Ken Gun Min b. 1976

Ken Gun Min’s paintings explore intimacy, masculinity, and representation across cultures, while employing a mixture of western-style oil paints, Korean pigments, embroidery, and beading on raw canvas. Often featuring nude and queer-coded men, his portraits and lush landscapes concoct fanciful idylls where longing, melancholy, and euphoria manifest irrespective of expectations imposed on people in daily life.

Born in Seoul, Min lived in San Francisco, Zurich, and Berlin before settling in Los Angeles. With this experience of Eurocentric capitals, his practice calls first-world-oriented perspectives into question. For the past several years, Min has focused on the creation of cross-cultural figures and spaces by integrating eastern and western painting styles on a single plane. This practice investigates the way figures and landscapes can be colored by the material and stylistic choices made in their rendering. In both his technical application and the scenes he composes, Min challenges conceptions of sexuality, gender, and race, especially as it is depicted in Western art history.

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. Recent solo exhibitions include MCA Denver, CO; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; and Shulamit Nazarian Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include the Denver Art Museum, CO; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; Whitecube, London, UK; Albertz Benda, New York, NY; Lehmann Maupin, Seoul, Korea; Highlights from the Gautreaux Collection, Peninsula Hotel, Chicago, IL. 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, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Observer, Artsy, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Wallpaper* and Frieze.

His work is included in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, FL; Los Angeles County Art Museum (LACMA), CA; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Marquez Art Projects, Miami, FL; CCS Bard, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection; and X Museum, Beijing, China.