Hanes Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Yong Soon Min

Born in a village near Seoul the year the Korean War ended with an armistice without peace and the continued division of the country, Yong Soon Min calls herself a Cold War baby. At age seven, she immigrated with her mother and brother to join their father in Monterey, California. Min became an Asian Pacific/Korean American in New York City during the 1980s, where she cut her political teeth.

Most notably, Min received a Fulbright Senior Research Grant, a COLA Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, a Korea Foundation Grant, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, a Guggenheim Foundation grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Visual Artist Award in New Genre. Significant exhibitions have been The Decade Show; decolonization, Bronx Museum; Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art, Queens Museum and Kumho Museum, Seoul; Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, Asia Society and travelled; Bride of No Return- solo exhibition that travelled to three spaces including Art in General; the 4^th and 10^th Havana Bienal; 7^th Gwangju Biennale; 3^rd Guangzhou Triennial; Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Smith College Museum; LACMA (Los Angeles); Seoul Museum of Art and Commonwealth and Council gallery. Among exhibitions she has curated are: Memories of Overdevelopment: Contemporary Art in the Philippine Diaspora; THERE: Sites of Korean Diaspora for 4th Gwangju Biennale and transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix held in Seoul, Ho Chi Minh City, Irvine and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Min served on the Board of Directors of the Asian American Arts Alliance, CAA and the Korean American Museum. She currently serves on the Artists Board of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA LA) and the steering committee of GYOPO. She is now Professor Emerita at UC Irvine, with an MFA from UC Berkeley, followed by a postdoc at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.

An endowment established in 1983 through the generosity of Nancy and Robin Hanes supports the Carolina art department’s Visiting Artist Series. This important program brings both established and emerging artists to campus to discuss their work in public lectures and to offer individual critiques to our MFA students. The Hanes Visiting Artist series greatly enriches both our academic programs and our outreach to the wider community. All lectures are free and open to the public.

This event is co-sponsored by UNC Institute for Arts and Humanities; Carolina Asia Center; and the following programs at Duke University: Franklin Humanities Institute World Arts Series; Duke Arts; AMES; APSI; AMI; and English.