Mina Cheon is a Korean new media artist, scholar, and educator who lives and works in Baltimore, New York, and Seoul. She exhibits political pop art known as “Polipop” internationally. Being a part of the Korean diaspora, Cheon’s art results from a lifetime of working with a postcolonial and comparative cultural lens. She makes contemporary art that is in historic alignment to appropriation art and global activism art while focusing on North Korean awareness, Korean unification, and global peace projects. She is an invited artist to the inaugural Asia Society Triennial 2020-2021 and has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Ethan Cohen Gallery where she is represented. Mina Cheon participated in the Waterfall Gallery’s women empowerment exhibition “The Need for My Care,” curated by Doo Eun Choi and Kate Shin in 2016. As a part of the Waterfall Healing Campaign 2020, Cheon states: “To me, art can heal and help unite divided worlds, and bring peace on earth.”
Mina Cheon had solo exhibitions at the Ethan Cohen Gallery (2014, 2017-18) and Lance Fung Gallery (2012) in New York; Trunk Gallery (2014), Sungkok Art Museum (2012), and Insa Art Space (2004-5) in Seoul, Korea; Maryland Art Place (2012) and C.Grimaldis Gallery (2008) in Baltimore. She has also exhibited and/or is in the collection at the Noyes Museum of Art, Seoul Olympic Museum, American University Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, and participated in the 2018 Busan Biennale.
Currently, Cheon is a Full-time Professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). She received her Ph.D. 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.
In the Dreaming Unification painting series by Mina Cheon, her North Korean art persona “Kim Il Soon” paints the third Korean national flag- the Unification Flag. Cheon has been painting Kim Il Soon in the socialist realism propaganda style, hot pink drip abstract expressionism, and in Yves Klein’s IKB dip conceptual paintings. As she masters Western art styles and dreams for liberation within the canvas as well as from the North Korean regime, the new series as a “protest for peace” is done with stencils and spray paint, and Sumi ink.