Ken Gun Min was born in South Korea and lived in San Francisco, Zurich and Berlin before relocating to Los Angeles, California. Having lived and worked in Eurocentric capitals for almost two decades, his practice challenges first-world-oriented perspectives. For the past several years, his work has focused on creating cross-cultural figures and spaces by using a mixture of western-style oil paints, Asian pigments, and an array of colorful beads and vintage crystals on raw canvas.

Ken studied western painting and art history and theory at Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea, and received an M.F.A from the Academy of Art, University of San Francisco. "In our daily lives, we are in a constant encounter with imagery, navigating through smartphones, monitors, media, and textbooks. Every day, there is countless visual information being dumped into our awareness. These images are being infinitely reproduced and distributed, passing through our cognition filters to either remain or be trashed." Ken Gun Min mines his personal image bank, patching similar and disparate images in endless combinations.

His painting often combines references sourced from online collections, his own photography and commercial illustrations with an array of copies, vintage animation clips, or screen captures from random Twitter feeds. These juxtapositions occur side by side on canvas. Ken is interested in looking back at his selection process and how he uses these images artistically. "The flow of images shows and influences the way I make art, more specifically, influences they way I see or I live. The diversity of categories - media, personal, and historical references - become materials to use. They are layers creating new context and flow. I am fascinated by this moment of encounter and how the moment guides me to find out who I am and how I see."

https://kengunmin.com

https://kcontemporaryart.com/