Beginning in 2014 and guided by his studies in London, Joonhong Min’s semi-abstract installations, paintings, and videos have taken buildings, construction materials and physical sites as points of inspiration. Since the global pandemic in 2020, intense periods of lockdown and online immersion have motivated him to re-interpret urban life in the context of the virtual spaces that so often paralyze his sense of reason and thought.

Saturated by the transmission of ads, products, and people on social media, as well as algorithms that filter out global truths in favor of sweet-scented filler, Joonhong experienced firsthand how internet trends and platform capitalism are commodifying cultures and datafying their original forms. In his Covid collection, he portrays the ways incarcerated individuals selected, consumed, and excreted these cultural products in a way that compounded urban hysteria and drove communities apart.

Joonhong contorts concrete architectural forms into simulations where human figures undergo multiple disjointed vanishing points and uncomfortable combinations. Processed, edited, and disseminated amidst chaotic digitalscapes, these materialistic protagonists are rendered anonymous, or at best, dramatically fragmented replicants for whom brushes with diversity and the sanctity of belonging mean very little at all.

CONSTERNATION LIFESTYLE II (2023). ACRYLIC AND PEN ON WOODEN PANEL. 59.4 X 42 X 4CM.

CONSTERNATION LIFESTYLE I (2023). ACRYLIC AND PEN ON WOODEN PANEL. 29.7 X 21 X 2CM.

CONSTERNATION LIFE STYLE II (2023). ACRYLIC AND PEN ON WOODEN PANEL. 29.7 X 21 X 2CM.

UTOPIAN COMPLEX II (2021). PEN AND ACRYLIC ON PAPER. 50 X 100CM.

Discover more of Joonhong’s works in Issue 4 of our magazine!