Yong Soon Min was born in 1953– the year the Korean War ended in an armistice and the year of Joseph Stalin’s death during the Cold War. Min, a lovingly self proclaimed “Cold War Baby,” spent her artistic career unraveling the aftereffects and enduring consequences of these wars on nation-state history, diasporic (forced and chosen) migration, and on the bodies of generations of peoples. Join us for a panel discussion which includes Simon Leung, project-based artist and professor of art, UC Irvine; Sunny Xiang, assistant professor of English and affiliate professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Yale University; and Steven Lee, associate professor of English, UC Berkeley; who will contextualize the geopolitics of the Koreas in relation to the major players of the Cold War and share how the echoes of these pasts still are in play in contemporary politics and art practice today, especially in relation to Min’s final commissioned artwork, KISSSSS. After presentations by each participant, independent curator Amy Kahng, PHD Candidate Stony Brook University Department of Art, will moderate a dynamic conversation.

All donations collected will be put in a special Yong Soon Min Fund, used for programs that are related to Korean history. Yong Soon's family will be notified of your contribution.

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Sunny Xiang studies and teaches race, war, and empire through wide-ranging aesthetic, cultural, literary, and documentary materials. She is particularly interested in the methodological questions and perceptual challenges introduced by U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific during the mid-twentieth century. Her first book Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War was published by Columbia University Press in 2020. Her current project, Chemical Apophenia: Air Conspiracies and Skin Connections in the Toxic Tropics, explores how U.S. WWII military science in the Pacific theater generated new paradigms for detecting and combating toxicity in the air– and on the skin. In understanding war, empire, and science as not only structures of power but also regimes of perception and styles of knowing, Xiang's scholarship shows how aesthetic and cultural approaches can create surprising conversations across Asian American studies, Pacific studies, critical militarization studies, and feminist science studies.

Simon Leung is Professor of Art and Asian American Studies at UCI. Among Leung’s works include a live/video performance addressing AIDS in the figure of the glory hole; a trilogy on “the residual space of the Vietnam War;” an extended proposal of Duchamp’s oeuvre as a discourse in ethics; a meditation on the site/non-site dialectic by way of Edgar Allan Poe; context-specific projects centering on the squatting body as heuristic cipher; a twenty-seven year collaboration with the late Warren Niesłuchowski; “art workers’ theater” at the intersection of art/labor; and an opera set in and around Griffith Park. At the heart of all of Leung’s work is a meditation of the ethical challenge, broadly defined. Leung has received fellowships from City of Los Angeles, California Community Foundation, Fellows of Contemporary Art, NYSCA, NYFA, the Clark Art Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is co-editor of Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985.

Steven Lee is an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley, where he is also affiliated with the Asian American Research Center, the Center for Korean Studies, and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. After graduating from Amherst College, he was among the inaugural group of Fulbright students to conduct research in the Central Asian Republics, where he compared Soviet Korean and Korean American literatures and histories. He is the author of The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Cultures and World Revolution (Columbia UP, 2015), co-winner of the MLA’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies; and co-editor (with Amelia Glaser) of Comintern Aesthetics (University of Toronto Press, 2020), winner of the ACLA's René Wellek Prize. He is currently working on a book manuscript on the far left and far right in Northeast Asia in the years surrounding World War II, and the imprints of these ideologies on Asian American and Asian Anglophone writing.

Amy Kahng is a PhD candidate in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University. Her dissertation project examines twentieth century Asian American artists and their relationship to land and landscape. Amy is a 2024-25 Tyson Predoctoral Fellow at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art Museum and her research has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Graduate Council Fellowship (Stony Brook), and the Center for Korean Studies (Stony Brook). Amy is an independent curator and has contributed to projects at MoMA, MFA Boston, J. Paul Getty Museum, Kukje Gallery, and the Weisman Museum of Art. She has curated exhibitions including Moving towards Home: Art for Palestine in New York City 1989 & 2024, an exhibition reexamining the 1989 Yong Soon Min-curated exhibition Homeland: A Palestinian Quest; Mis/Communication: Language and Power in Contemporary Art; Revisiting 5+1; and Printing Solidarity: Tricontinental Graphics from Cuba.

Cold War Baby: Historical Context Meets Aesthetics

Panel discussion co-presented with UC Irvine on the occasion of The Kisssss exhibition by Yong Soon Min with panelists Steven Lee, Simon Leung, and Sunny Xiang, moderated by Amy Kahng