“It is worth wondering, perhaps, what the wishes are in kissing,” Adam Phillips writes. In his readings of Freud, Phillips suggests that a kiss is the admission that the self cannot wholly, singularly satisfy its own desire—it is not sovereign. Instead, the self must turn toward other potentially unwieldy objects independent from the self, like someone else. Yong Soon Min reminded us of this in her solo exhibition KISSSSS, titled after an unfinished work and on view late last year at the University of California, Irvine’s Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, where she, too, wondered what the wishes are in kissing. If kisses, as Phillips puts it, “involve us in the dangerous allure and confusion of mistaken identity, of getting muddled up,” Min asks: What narratives of mistaken identities can a kiss tell across varying scales, muddled between the tender intimacies of the domestic and the tensile distances of the geopolitical, between war and its deferred end, between here and over there, between lips and other borders? In her attempt to answer, information is scrambled; discrete forms are inconvenienced and undermined.
Min had been developing KISSSSS while she was ill, up until her passing in the spring of 2024. The work is in keeping with her steadfast commitment to interrogating the material and psychic effects of the Korean war, and the diasporic, Asian American subjectivities and communities shaped by it, including her own. Whether as an MFA student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1970s, alongside Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; as a member of Godzilla, the Asian American arts network and artist community in New York, in the 1980s and 1990s; as a faculty member at UC Irvine’s art department, from 1993 onward; or as a cofounder of GYOPO, a Los Angeles–based collective of diasporic Korean art workers, Min sought after the company of other people to fill her life and art. It makes sense, then, that other people were integral to the making of KISSSSS. Min directed photographs taken by David Kelley in her home in LA and at Ernest E. Debs Regional Park, her favorite place to take walks. In the fourteen photographs she selected for the exhibition, several friends and fellow artists—Yun Gi Ahn, Patty Chang, Yaeun Stevie Choi, Luka Fisher, Chuck Sung Hohng, Weiwei Huang, Peter Kalisch, Kristina Klochok, hannah lee, Erin Min, Jordan Ruffin, Connie Samaras, Kayla Tange, and Jungmok Yi—modeled as lovers kissing in an embrace, pose to reenact the shifting alliances and antagonisms forged between China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, South Korea, the United States, and the United Nations throughout the Korean War. However, Min stalls the scene of the kiss, for in each photograph, models’ faces are obstructed, covered by the flags of those they represent. Min captures a head tilted back, resting on a lover’s shoulder, or a hand holding a lover’s arm or curved around the back of a lover’s head. These gestures prompt us to ask what kinds of violences of intervention, occupation, and dependency reveal themselves in excess of the romance of a kiss, which can breach a nation’s sovereignty and betray an international organization’s image of its own benevolence.
Min had been inspired by René Magritte’s The Lovers (1928). Magritte’s painting depicts a kiss between two people hindered by white fabric covering their heads. The line where noses, mouths, and chins meet traces an encounter of interrupted contact, the failure to touch. Magritte’s lovers could stand in for anyone, like blank white screens for a viewer’s projections. But in Min’s photographs, lovers’ faces are shrouded in recognizable symbols that uphold ideals of unity, pride, and belonging. Where the star of the North Korean flag meets the hammer and sickle of the Soviet Union’s flag, where that same star clashes with the stars and stripes of the US flag, or where the world map and wreath of olive-tree branches on the UN’s flag mirrors the shape of the taegeuk and geongongamri on the South Korean flag, a wish is made in the form of a kiss—a wish that renders some nations close, in uneasy, constrained alliance, while others are partitioned and kept apart.
Yong Soon Min, KISSSSS (installation view, University of California, Irvine’s Contemporary Arts Center Gallery), 2024. Photo: Yubo Dong, ofstudio photography.
KISSSSS occupied the gallery’s main space, positioned so that upon entry, a viewer faces seven low brick “stations” laid out in single file, from the front to the back of the room. Each of the stations, arranged in chronological order, represented an event during the Korean War, beginning when the US military established the 38th parallel dividing North and South Korea at the end of World War II in 1945, and leading up to the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement in 1953, still in effect to this day. Min’s photographs of lovers kissing hang on the walls to the right and the left, with each photograph to the left aligning with a station and its historical moment. The exhibition’s curator, Bridget R. Cooks—Min’s friend and colleague at UC Irvine—decided to include materials on each station showing Min’s research. There were scans of pages from books on the Korean War marked with Min’s annotations, archival images, maps, and email correspondence between Min and her researcher, the artist C. Ryu. Walking from station to station and taking in all the information Min gathered had its intended effect, insofar as it insisted on the work’s incompletion, and the challenge that the duration of the Cold War presented to Min’s artistic practice.
For Min, the confusion of the kiss reflects the blurred erosion of time and space in the ongoingness of what the scholar Sunny Xiang calls “the American Cold War in Asia,” which, Xiang writes, is not a “historical event” so much as a “historiographic problem.” Min wrestled with this problem not to offer a definitive solution—a correct timeline or sequence of events—but to experiment, out of necessity, with the impossibility of arriving at one. For what solution could possibly stabilize a diasporic Asian American identity and offer a way to fully heal from the damages of war, colonialism, and empire? In Min’s photographs, a kiss is not a conduit to something universal. It is a means of inscribing the particular. A kiss is a consolation and a wound. What a kiss seals, in this case, is a war without end, a timeline unfinished, left to hit a wall, as it does physically within the gallery’s space.
The stations in the main gallery guided viewers to the back wall, the entirety of which featured Still/Incessant (2018/2024), a large-scale print of a photograph of the room where the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in Panmunjom. The village was located in the DMZ (demilitarized zone), and all that remains of it is the house that hosted ceasefire talks, now occupied by the North Korea Peace Museum. Min’s commemorative image is a ghostly one, showing an empty room with white curtains drawn and three green tables on top of which sit the flags of the UN and North Korea. The scale of the image led not to a feeling of immersion but of being dwarfed by what the emptiness of the room memorializes: a tenuous armistice that leaves families and land divided in its wake. Min’s last, completed work makes use of the same image in a hand-bound artist’s book, also titled Still/Incessant (2024). The book’s green cover echoes the green of the tables in the room in Panmunjom, and the image on the wall is reproduced across multiple spreads, with each iteration saturated in red in 1 percent increments, culminating in a final spread of solid, opaque, bright red. An image of a historical event that has already taken place typically stays static, yet here it gradually bleeds into the present, obfuscating the clarity of commemoration and the contingency of a ceasefire.
Yong Soon Min, KISSSSS (installation view, University of California, Irvine’s Contemporary Arts Center Gallery), 2024. Photo: Yubo Dong, ofstudio photography.
Five copies of Still/Incessant were displayed on a white table facing a wall showing Both Sides Now (2018), Min’s earliest work in the exhibition, comprising five prints. In the late 1990s, Min visited the DMZ’s Joint Security Area twice—the South Korea side in 1995 and the North Korea side in 1998—and each time, she bought postcards. Min paired postcards from one side with their visually corresponding part from the other, then she cut them up into vertical strips that she spliced together, each strip of a postcard interrupted by a strip from another. In one work, the Panmun Pavilion, a North Korean building in the Joint Security Area, is shown from the North and South. In another, two delegates from South Korea are photographed having returned through Panmunjom, their likenesses cut up and interwoven with a photograph of US and South Korean soldiers of the United Nations Command standing guard at the Bridge of No Return in the Joint Security Area. In the former, the same building is given the illusion of dimension in difference, and in the latter, to return is a promise and source of hope, as well as a threat, depending on which side you’re on—which, as Min would have it, is both. Like identities caught up in a kiss, places lose their definition, and so does the self who hopes to find its corresponding part by sending a postcard, by crossing a border, by leaning in for a kiss.
This past December, just before Min’s exhibition closed, the right-wing conservative president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, tried and failed to call martial law, citing, without specificity, the need to protect the nation from “anti-state” North Korean communist forces. Yoon’s rash, illogical decision, which led to widespread protest, a vote by the National Assembly for his impeachment, and his subsequent arrest by the South Korean police, fuels and underscores the continuously fragile geopolitical relations in Asia, where North Korea and China’s alignment with Russia, and South Korea’s alignment with the US, set the stage for wars that have never reached a peaceful conclusion. We can feel the lingering effects of these precarious alignments, of wishes asserted in crisis, as an embrace that lasts for too long, arousing alarm and stirring up sorrow as opposed to guaranteeing security and comfort. A blocked kiss, like those Min captured, draws attention to what remains distant—a split nation’s reunification—and what draws near—a war that simultaneously encroaches and keeps going, wherein militarized national borders foster paranoia and the means to exact violence.
Yong Soon Min, KISSSSS (installation view, University of California, Irvine’s Contemporary Arts Center Gallery), 2024. Photo: Yubo Dong, ofstudio photography.
And yet, KISSSSS holds other wishes too. I see it in another place that emerges from the background of Min’s photographs, offered through the frame as another Cold War setting, without a symbol or flag to claim: Min’s home. While the photographs on the gallery’s right wall show lovers kissing in front of a white backdrop, almost all of the photographs on the left wall—with the exception of the one taken in Debs Park—place them in Min’s living room, kitchen, dining room, office, and garage. Min’s models hold one another among her belongings, her food, furniture, books, papers, storage boxes, and some of her earlier works (recognizable from behind or to the side of the models), adding depth to the photograph’s cozy composition in lived-in spaces. In one photograph, two models kiss in front of curtained windows, where, just to the left, is a partial view of a black-and-white gelatin-silver print from Defining Moments (1992), a series of self-portraits by Min. (This series, at the time of her passing, was on view in Scratching at the Moon, an exhibition of Los Angeles–based Asian American artists at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.)
In this 1992 print, a negative image of Min’s torso and arms bear the words and phrases “HEARTLAND” and “OCCUPIED TERRITORY.” Her abdomen carries a spiral of dates that entangles the broader history of the Korean diaspora with her own life, including the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement in 1953—the same year Min was born; the student uprisings of the April Revolution in South Korea in 1960, which Min witnessed when she was young, before immigrating to the US; as well as the 1980 Gwangju uprising and 1992 LA uprising, both of which, in different ways, sparked Min’s political awakening as a Korean American artist. What feels like coincidence, like the happenstance alignment of events, is anything but—all these dates converge with too much meaning on Min’s body, leaving their imprint on her skin and going deeper, carving out the negative space and time she finds herself in.
These details of Min’s life, mapped onto historical time and constitutive of it, prompt us to consider not only the ways international relations take up residence in the privacy of the domestic, but also who Min invited and welcomed into her home, as an artist, curator, and teacher. With KISSSSS, loved ones became her collaborators who modeled for her and helped her take photographs, and who, in turn, became familiar with her home, history, and work. The confusion of mistaken identities can be painful; it can feel like proof of one’s own shortcomings, one’s lack of definition. In Min’s work, though, such confusion leads to the persistent want for communities of one’s own, and a devotion to the people who make them. Perhaps this want, and its accompanying devotion, is the lasting wish of KISSSSS.
