Mina Cheon <Bio> <Resume> <Reviews> <Art Projects> <Writings> <Teaching>
The City Paper
Mina Cheon: Addressing Dolls
By Kate Noonan
March 26, 2008
"Mina Cheon, a Korean-American artist and Maryland Institute College of Art professor, examines Korean-American political tensions and the Korean national identity through the lens of gender and costume in her current exhibition at C. Grimaldis Gallery. By using women and their social identifiers, Cheon exposes the influence of Western ideals in South Korea, along with dual fears and fetishes regarding North Korea. In addition, she plays with the ideas of multiples and mass production to comment on capitalist economic issues affecting both North and South in two very different ways. In doing so, Cheon reinforces the dichotomy placed upon the two countries through the eyes of the Western outsider, and at the same time comments through the eyes of a citizen." Continued: http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=15492
BMORE Art
Mina Cheon: Addressing Dolls at Grimaldis Gallery
By Jarrett Min Davis
Saturday, March 15, 2008
"While looking at Mina Cheon’s outstanding exhibition at Grimaldis Gallery, one is struck by effective accumulation of hand-made dolls and life-size digital printouts of paper dresses. As one artist friend mentioned to me, “There are high-intensity, low effort exhibitions and high-intensity, high effort exhibitions. This exhibition falls into the later category.” Ms. Cheon’s work for this exhibition is divided into two main bodies of work: the 99 Miss Kim(s) consisting of 99 identical handmade female dolls in North Korean military uniforms and Party Dresses & Home Dresses consisting of large-scale digital printouts of paper doll dresses intended for young Korean girls during the 1970’s. Party Dresses & Home Dresses are residual artifacts of the goals and aspirations of a third-world country on its march towards Westernization and Modernism. Along the way there are bound to be embarrassing missteps and faulty translations. It is the cultural equivalent of looking at pictures of early teenage years and turning red over the sartorial choices. Ms. Cheon exposes the ridiculous and overblown styles intended for the “modern” Korean woman. Of course, paper dolls are intended for children. It is a thinly veiled attempt to expose young girls to “modern” fashion and cultivate an appreciation of it at the cost of the traditional Korean hanbok." Continued: http://bmoreart.blogspot.com/2008/03/mina-cheon-addressing-dolls-at.html
Voices of America Interview of Mina Cheon
By Mi Jeong Hibbitts, reporter with Voice of America, Korean Service.
The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. VOA broadcasts more than 1,000 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of more than 100 million people. It is currently broadcast around the world in 44 languages. The Korean Service of VOA broadcasts only in radio for 5 hours a day to N. Korea as well as S. Korea. This recording was broadcasted March 24, 2008. Continued: http://www.voanews.com/korean/2008-03-24-voa25.cfm
Radar Redux Baltimore Arts and Culture
Interview: Artist Project
On artist Mina Cheon with architect Gabriel Kroiz
And with interviewee Jack Livingston
March 2008 Continued: http://www.radarredux.com/reviews/cheon_rev.html
"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
The Sun Paper March 15, 2008
Art Review
By Glenn McNatt, Sun Art Critic
'Dolls' reflects drama in Korea
“Imagine 99 identical Barbie dolls in green Army fatigues and boots arrayed in parade rank before a crimson backdrop. It's an image of militaristic, monolithic power that pretty much sums up artist Mina Cheon's decidedly dim view of totalitarian rule.” Continued: http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/bal-to.kims15mar15,0,5959301.story
The Sun Paper March 9, 2008
Opinion Section, Op/Ed, Commentary
An artist wonders
What's driving the conflict between North Korea and South Korea now?
By Mina Cheon
“When I travel between the U.S. and South Korea, it is hard not to notice the striking differences between Korean and American media when it comes to world events. As an artist, I am intrigued by this cultural and political media gap. The two countries may be allies, but each has its own version of reality.” Continued: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.koreaart09mar09,0,7255275.story
Urbanite Bi-Weekly
03.12.08, On-line issue 58
Featured Artist: Mina Cheon
"Dolls seem an unlikely medium for broaching political conflict, but in Addressing Dolls South Korean-born artist and
2008 Urbanite Project participant Mina Cheon uses the figures, some lavishly attired, others in military gear, to depict the divide between North and South Korea."
Artist Organized Art
March 7th 2008: Embarrassment and Address by Brian Willems
Mina Cheon's Addressing Dolls at the C.Grimaldis Gallery
http://artistorganizedart.org/commons/
WYPR 88.1 Radio, NPR News Station
Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast
Culture Calendar
Tom Hall is joined this week by Barry Rascovar, columnist for The Gazette and a frequent guest on Inside Politics, to bring you this week's events:
“And Korean is much in the news these days with the NY Philharmonic appearing there this week. Tomorrow night, the C.Grimaldis Gallery opens an exhibit of the work of Mina Cheon, her work which is heavily influenced by her Korean upbringing, shows the contrasting worlds of two Koreas, the North is represented in 99 Miss Kim(s), a collection of 99 handmade dolls dressed in North Korean military garb, the kaki is contrasted by the bright colors and decorations of the South in “Dresses for Different Events.” The collections of dresses made from paper dolls are reminiscent of Cheon’s childhood toys. There is an artist reception tomorrow at 5:30.” Continued: http://www.wypr.org/MD_MORNING.html
City Paper, Baltimore Weekly
Vol.32 No. 9, Feb. 27 – March 5, 2008
Art Opening Listing &
Critic’s Choice: Art
“Mina Cheon, a Korean-American artist and Maryland Institute College of Art professor, brings three doll-inspired works to C.Grimaldis Gallery – “99 Miss Kim(s),” “Dresses for Different Events,” and “Party Dresses and Home Dresses” – all of which give viewers some insight on Cheon’s experience growing up in South Korea in the 1970s. Her “99 Miss Kim(s)” exhibits a wall full of 99 handmade North Korean female military dolls. The title refers to North Korea’s founding president Kim and this piece visually comments on North Korea’s military-driven society. “Dresses for Difference Events” display the Western-influenced attire produced for South Korean (although all were Caucasion) paper dolls in the 1970s, blown up to life-sized proportions. Cheon looks back on her childhood paper dolls as an adult and educates viewers about the colonial influences in South Korea.” (Stephanie Thornton) http://baltimorecitypaper.com/calendar/event.asp?whatID=103197
Pretavoyager
“Yesterday on my way home it was love at first sight when I saw these incredible large scale Asian-inspired paper doll prints by Mina Cheon through the windows of C. Grimaldis Gallery. Cheon, an Asian-American who finds her home in Baltimore (a MICA professor), New York and Seoul, deals with issues of Westernization, Americanization and national propaganda through re-visiting the (now life-size) paper dolls she grew up with in South Korea in the 70s. More on 'Dresses for Different Events' here. The wall opposite the prints makes a statement, covered with "99 Miss Kim(s)" to commemorate the the North Korean establishment.
Addressing Dolls opens Thursday February 28th at the C. Grimaldis Gallery on Charles Street.
(images via Mina Cheon)”
http://pretavoyager.blogspot.com/2008/02/addressing-dolls.html
Visual Scope
Written by Christine Ricks
“Mina Cheon's work on display now at C. Grimaldis can be neatly organized into three sub-categories: a sprawling wall-length installation of handmade dolls, an assortment of life-size digital prints of paper doll outfit, and a wall displaying paper doll outfits that are not life-size but nevertheless are a bit bigger I would expect for paper dolls. The handmade dolls are the first thing you see when you walk into the gallery; they are installed on a front wall that is painted red. Each doll stands inside a plastic display container. They hover on the wall as if they erupted out of it somehow, materializing from the very structure of the gallery. Although the dolls are made with uniformity in mind, one cannot help but look for the differences between each one, seeking to distinguish them as individuals as we encounter them in this crowd. We see them as one unit when several feet away, but up close insignificant differences are visible: the gesture of their tilted heads, the formation of their aggressively large black boots. The dolls are made in reference to the North Korean military. Their outfits still include a daintily-shaped skirt, but the material is not the gossamer polyester so often found adorning dolls; the cloth seen here is the dull green of the military. Decoration is not completely absent here, but it serves the purpose of nationalism. A red star appears on each doll's cap. The buttons of their structured little jackets are painted red. Their lips are red too, and poised in an enigmatic smile. The aforementioned head tilt implies that they know something the viewer does not. They seem confident and poised. If this army actually existed, it would be difficult to picture them in actual combat, because what we see here seems to be an army that has already won. Their wounds have healed, or perhaps they were never wounded to begin with.As a young woman I find the life-size paper doll outfits to be incredibly loaded, pungent with the promise of a version of womanhood few, if any, ever achieve. The life-size outfits are distinguished by where they would be worn: home, a party, or another special event - a "Miss Korea" outfit is included, for example. Two spectacularly opulent dresses do not have any assigned purpose and remain untitled; this distinction lends them a sort of ghostly significance. They are outfits that exist outside of a realistic, normal life. They're not wedding dresses (as far as I can tell, anyhow) but they're so elaborate it's difficult to determine where they'd be appropriate. One can imagine a woman wearing such a dress to another's party and being the subject of confusion and irritation: why so overdressed? Is she desperate for attention? These two dresses in particular seem to refer to the ever-present specter of the princess, lingering over womanhood even as the other outfits at least attempt to connect themselves to a real life.” (Essay continued on-line)
http://www.visual-scope.net/?q=node/27
Urbanite: for Baltimore’s Curious
March 2008 issue no. 45
Urbanite Project 2008: Second Annual Experiment in the Power Of Unconventional Ideas
Edited by Marianne Amoss
Team 7: Mina Cheon & Markand Thakar PROJECT "HAND to HAND"
http://www.urbanitebaltimore.com/project/2008/teams/team7/