Yong Soon Min

Yong Soon Min (; April 29, 1953 – March 12, 2024) was a South Korean-born American artist, curator, and educator. She served as professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine. Her artwork deals with issues including Korean-American identity, politics, personal narrative, and culture. Min was active in New York City and Los Angeles. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1960, settling in Monterey, California. Min met her father for the first time around age eight, because he had moved to the United States earlier than the rest of the family. In 1981, Min was part of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Work Her early work was primarily graphic or photography based; and by the mid-1980s she started to work more in installation art. She used the dress as a metaphor to explore her own history and identity as a Korean-American and the Korean books and clay rice pots allude to Korean Buddhism.

In her 1992 series "Defining Moments", Min photographed herself and filled her form with images of the Gwangju Uprising, which was a 1980 protest by South Korean students against a military dictator that was violently suppressed.

A brain hemorrhage that Min suffered in 2011 informed the works in her 2016 show held at the Commonwealth and Council gallery in Los Angeles. The works included AVM: After Venus (Mal)formation, which had a table split into triangles, each with its own word written on it.

At the time of her death, Min's work was featured in an exhibition about the Godzilla Asian American Arts Network at the Eric Firestone Gallery in New York City, while works from "Defining Moments" were included in a survey called "Scratching at the Moon" at ICA LA.