Gallery view of Diamond Room, Mina Cheon's solo exhibition "Polipop," at the Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul, Korea, 2012.
Mina Cheon's Polipop exhibition includes Polipop digital paintings, video and sculpture installations.
This gallery view shows Polipop digital paintings in the themes of critiquing capitalism, desiring beauty and diamonds, constructs of the Western world.
The series of digital paintings in the Diamond Room illustrate the absurd things you can buy in a capitalist world, such as the kiss of Prince William through Skype, or an image of all the 2011 contestants in America’s reality TV shows, such as the Biggest Loser, Bridezilla, Bachelor, and Survivor. Other images show the problems of a world driven by capitalism, pharmaceutical exploitation, going green as a fashion statement (regardless of politics or economy), and natural disasters that result from our neglected environment and global warming. The room is left white to reference the whiteness of diamonds, and the white and Western economic stratum that created much of capitalism today.
Dresses for Different Events, which was exhibited in 2008, makes its way to the museum show. It displays seven distinct pieces that illustrate desired Western beauty to the fullest. These dresses were mass printed in 1970s Korea, when the national propaganda urged Korea to grow economically like the West, infusing capitalist values with Confucian ethics of the East. The beauty portrayed in these dresses reveals fantasized Western beauty. These were the paper doll dresses that I played with everyday, growing up in Korea in the 1970s.
