Yong Soon Min is one of the most prolific Korean American artists to contribute to discourses on Asian American identity, culture and politics. She earned a BFA (1975), an MA (1977) and an MFA (1979) from the University of California, Berkeley. Her first exhibition, Half Home (1986), marked a major shift in her work in which she began exploring the hybridities of Asian American identities, specifically looking at how her work could exist in relation to politically active Korean diasporic communities. In the early 1990s, Y. S. Min started her curatorial practice. She also created collaborative works in the 1990s and early 2000s with artists such as Allan deSouza (1958–) and Abdelali Dahrouch (1963–).
Y. S. Min’s earlier inquiries into form continue to exist as indelible traces in her installations, sculptures, videos and images. Her works Make Me (1989), Defining Moments (1992), DMZ XING (1994) and Bridge of No Return (1997) involve the layering of images and words by incorporating the reflective, transparent or translucent qualities of mirrors, lights, glass (etched or otherwise), double exposures, mesh and/or papers. Her interest in the question of discourse takes form in her body of work through the integration of phrases, passages or essays that are printed on, drawn on, overlaid onto or cut out of an object’s surface, and at times, represented as literal books in artworks such as Dwelling (1992) and Strangers to Ourselves (2004).

Themes of disability and language would emerge in Y. S. Min’s later works in response to her brain haemorrhage in 2011, in observation of her loss of the Korean language and her misidentification of English words during her recovery. By the late 2010s, she had begun to include forms of Korean traditional art, such as the byeongpung – the folding screen – and the chaekgeori – a Chosŏn-era genre of Korean still-life painting of books (often on shelves with other objects) – through the works Alice (Miok) (2017), Last Notes and Sketches, Min Tae Yong (1918-2001) (2016) and Mnemonic Journey (2018). Her ruminations on the figure of Alice Hyun as the first Korean American woman to be born in Hawaii furthers Y. S. Min’s search for and contextualization of Korean American political and cultural identity. Her oeuvre stay consistent to her self-characterization as a “Cold War baby” in examining the historical division of North and South Koreas and the possibility of Korean reunification through works on and about the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

Y. S. Min is a Professor Emerita of the University of California, Irvine. She is a founding and steering committee member of GYOPO (a collective of Korean diasporic makers) and an artist board member of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA LA). Her works have been exhibited internationally in shows such as the Gwangju Biennales in South Korea (2002, 2008, 2018). She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program (2011–2012), the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department (2010–2011) and the Korea Foundation (2008).