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 in lush landscapes and intricately embellished surfaces, his compositions weave together painting and textile traditions to create immersive worlds where beauty and ornament give way to vulnerability, desire, and power.

Born in Seoul, Min lived in San Francisco, Zurich, and Berlin before settling in Los Angeles. Drawing from experiences across Korea, Europe, and the United States, his practice challenges Eurocentric perspectives by bringing Eastern and Western artistic traditions into direct dialogue. References to European hunting scenes, religious painting, East Asian landscape traditions, Korean folk imagery, and the historical format of painted folding screens coexist, collapsing disparate visual languages on a single plane.

Queer narratives emerge most directly through Min’s treatment of the male body within the landscape. Figures emerge from dense foliage or occupy landscapes that oscillate between intimacy and danger, implicating the viewer in acts of looking while unsettling conventional hierarchies between subject and spectator. At the same time, Min embeds broader political histories within these imagined worlds, referencing histories of occupation and displacement, and the ways landscapes absorb personal and collective memory. Through these layered material and visual strategies, Min challenges dominant modes of representation, creating paintings that are at once seductive and unsettling, where fantasy and history, pleasure and grief, and Eastern and Western traditions continually converge.

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; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; 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.