For his first solo museum exhibition, Ken Gun Min focuses on one of the major throughlines in his practice: landscapes and the natural world. Featuring expansive paintings from the last six years, The Lost Paradise foregrounds Min’s use of real and imagined landscapes, through which he explores issues such as race, gender, sexuality, and immigrant experiences. In these works, Min creates new ecologies where dense, richly-textured compositions serve as metaphors for human experiences of desire, loss, and power. 

Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1976, Min studied Western painting technique and art history in Seoul before moving to California. Min often reckons with the cultural transition from South Korea to the United States through his painting practice, merging Western-style oil paints and Korean pearl pigments on raw canvas to depict prismatically colorful landscapes, sometimes with animals and figures. The paintings are often inspired by real events at sites in Los Angeles (where the artist resides), current events, and locations from the artist’s own memory and imagination. These lushly rendered scenes — frequently embellished with embroidery, beading, and found textiles — depict the natural world as an enigmatic place ripe with beauty and the sublime, but also with turmoil, melancholy, and contradiction.

About the artist

Ken Gun Min’s (b. 1976, Seoul; lives and works in Los Angeles) paintings explore intimacy, masculinity, and representation across cultures, while employing a mixture of western-style oil paints, Asian pigments, embroidery, and beading on raw canvas. Often featuring nude and queer-coded men, his portraits and lush and vibrant landscapes concoct fanciful queer idylls where longing, melancholy, and euphoria manifest irrespective of expectations imposed on people in daily life.

Ken Gun Min studied western painting and art history and theory at Hongik University in Seoul, Korea and received his MFA from the Academy of Art, University of San Francisco. Solo exhibitions include Silverlake Dog Park, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; Wounded Man, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, K contemporary, Denver, CO; and Becoming Palm Tree, Gae Po Project Space, Seoul, Korea. Group exhibitions that featured Min’s work include Strings of Desire, Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles, CA; i know you are, but what am i? (De)Framing Identity and the Body, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT; Sparkle in, Fade out, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; People of the Otherworld: Ken Kiff in Dialogue, Albertz Benda, New York, NY; Who is Your Master? 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; Bozomag: Bozo Family Hoedown, M+B gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and 36 Paintings, Harper’s, East Hampton, NY. He was a Hopper Prize finalist and received awards from Direktorenhaus, Berlin, DE and the Kellogg Foundation, New York, NY. Min’s work has been featured in Artnet, Artsy, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Wallpaper* and Frieze. Ken Gun Min has forthcoming solo exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum in 2025.