“KISSSSS” in Irvine is an intimate look at an artists’ last work
For curator Bridget R. Cooks, the intimacy of the work featured in Yong Soon Min’s “KISSSSS” is poignant and arresting.
“It is really powerful and unexpected,” she said.
The personal nature of the exhibition goes even further for Cooks, as the late artist, a UC Irvine professor emerita was a colleague and friend of Cooks, who herself is the Chancellor’s Fellow and a professor of African American studies and art history at UCI.
On view at the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery on UCI’s campus and co-sponsored by UCI’s Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art and Claire Trevor School of the Arts with support from UCI’s Center for Critical Korean Studies and Claire Trevor Society, “KISSSSS” is a labor of love. Cooks and other fellow artists worked together to finish the exhibition, carefully crafting the show the way they believed Min would have wanted it.
“It was a very fulfilling experience because I was working with her team of artist friends,” said Cooks. “Everyone missed her, everyone felt so sad and everyone wanted to do the right thing.”
Much of Min’s identity was wrapped up in the year of her birth, 1953. She was born during the Korean War in Bugok, in a village in South Korea just south of Seoul where she lived until age 7 when her family moved to the coastal town of Monterey, Calif.
“She was born in 1953, which was when the armistice was signed declaring a military ceasefire between what was newly North and South Korea,” said Cooks. “She always felt very personally marked by that because that was also the year that she emerged, and it felt like the beginning of her life was this kind of ambiguous ending to this war that, technically, is still going on.”
Min attended UC Berkeley, earning her bachelor’s degree, master’s of arts and master’s of fine arts degrees. She became an educator, artist, activist and curator who continued to explore the impact of the Korean War in her studies and her art. In 1993, she joined the Department of Art faculty at UCI. Min passed away from breast cancer in March.
Currently, there are three separate works by Min at the gallery. Five prints on the wall titled “Both Sides Now” are part of a work Min completed in 2018.
“This is a combination of images from postcards she took when she went to the Joint Security zone, the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea,” said Cooks, “because there are gift shops there.”
A pack of 10 postcards from two trips to the Joint Security area in the 1990s are spliced together in a collage to make a series of five prints that alternate two images, demonstrating the parallels of North and South Korea.
One image repeats throughout the gallery: three tables in a neat row.
“In this image we have a room with these tables, this is the room and the tables where the armistice was signed,” said Cooks. “So that becomes a really important space in the history of the political war, but also for her and her work.”
The image is the focus of a second work, “Still/Incessant,” five newly produced artist books.
“This really is the last work that she completed,” said Cooks.
The conceptual work is a heavy book, bound in a military green cover, with the image of the tables on every page, turning progressively more red until the image is completely obscured by the color. There are just five copies of the book, each lined up for viewing with gloves for handling.
“KISSSSS” is the third and unfinished work by Min and the title of the whole show. Min wanted to include representation of seven important moments that traced the beginning of the Korean War to the signing of the armistice.
“She passed before she was able to figure out how to convey that research. So what the team has done is looked at her notes, what she highlighted to help us understand how she was collecting these seven different moments,” said Cooks.
Seven brick stations that display her notes and mark those events line up in the center of the gallery, placed with intention.
“The latitudinal North location of the split between North and South Korea is called the 38th parallel, so the horizontal bricks are about 38 inches long, and the vertical ones are about 38 inches high,” said Cooks. “That was something that Yong Soon came up with and then we worked together to come up with these designs.”
The brick stations are surrounded by walls with seven images on each, showing what was happening politically at these different stages in time.
The images show two people in various stages of embrace, with flags obscuring their faces, inspired by work from artist René Magritte’s 1928 painting “The Lovers.”
“In that painting you have two people who have these white clothes, and they are kissing, but they are not actually touching and that kind of surrealist intimacy but separation made sense conceptually for Yong Soon to explain the relationship between China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, South Korea, the United States and the United Nations,” said Cooks. “These are the different entities you see represented by the flags.”
The show’s opening on Oct. 5 also served as a memorial for the artist and included a walk-through of the exhibition with Kylie Ching, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher. On Oct. 26, a panel titled “KISSSSS and Legacy of Yong Soon Min as Artist, Curator, and Mentor” is planned with the participation of some of Min’s artist friends who helped with the exhibition. The show ends on Dec. 17.
Deciding how a curator should be involved in a project when the artist has died is a subject Cooks tackles with her own students. She found this project to be both gratifying and emotional, she said, and feels Min would have wanted the team at UCI to help fulfill her vision.
“We just wanted to make sure that we did something that she would be happy with,” Cooks said.
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