Mina Cheon (PhD, MFA) is a global Korean-American new media artist, scholar, and educator who divides her time between Baltimore, New York, and Seoul, Korea. Cheon has exhibited her political pop art known as “Polipop” internationally and draws inspiration from global media and popular culture to produce artworks that intersect politics and pop art in subversive and provocative ways.

While she creates work that ranges in medium from new media, video, installation, performance, and public projects to traditional media of painting and sculptures, her thematic focus includes geopolitical and contested spaces, race culture and postcolonialism, and Asia’s relationship to the Western world in global media culture. In particular, Cheon has worked on North Korean awareness and global peace projects since 2004 and the content of the work is in historic alignment to appropriation art and global activism art. Cheon’s specific focus on East-Asia reflects the transgenerational trauma of Korea’s history, of its division and war and of Japanese colonization. Having parents originate from the North and herself part of the Korean global diaspora, Cheon’s art results from a life-time of working with a cultural comparative lens and understanding Asia through its power relations with the world. Cheon recently shared her work at the Busan Biennale 2018, and has exhibited her work and/or in the collection of the Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul Olympic Museum, American University Museum, Smith College Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland Art Place Contemporary Art Center, Insa Art Space Korean Arts Council, C.Grimaldis Gallery, Lance Fung Gallery, Trunk Gallery, and represented by the Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York.

Cheon is the author of Shamanism + Cyberspace (Atropos Press, Dresden and New York, 2009), contributor for ArtUSWolgan MisoolNew York Arts MagazineArtist Organized Artand served on the Board of Directors of the New Media Caucus of the College Art Association, as well as an Associate Editor of the peer review academic journal Media-N. Reviews for Media-N include critical essays covering SeMA Mediacity Seoul Biennale 2016 and the Venice Biennale 2017. Awarded the 2010 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and Unity Week Award for her efforts promoting cultural diversity within and beyond her college, she is a Full-time Professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA); was a visiting professor and lecturer at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea where she teaches during the summers; and a mentor of Art-Uni-On, a global mentorship network by Hyundai Co. and the Seoul National University College of Fine Arts. Cheon received her PhD in Philosophy of Media and Communications from the European Graduate School, European University for Interdisciplinary Studies, Switzerland; has two MFA degrees, one in painting from the Hoffberger School of Painting, MICA and another MFA in Imaging Digital Arts from UMBC: An Honors University in Maryland; and her BFA is in painting from Ewha Womans University.