Enter a Vivid, Vanishing Dream World in Ken Gun Min’s The Lost Paradise at MCA Denver

A glowing gold palm tree, with long shoots of green leaves, growing so tall in Los Angeles's Koreatown that the city had to chop it down. A pomegranate sliced in half, spilling its dark red juices on the forest floor. The words of a Palestinian poet, whose last wish was for his life to be an inspiration. The backs and bare limbs of bathers in a sacred river, tucked in a canyon snuffed out by wildfires — a paradise lost but remembered in a lucid blue dream.

These are just a few of the images you’ll discover in the eight large, mesmerizing canvases of Ken Gun Min’s The Lost Paradise, which is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art through May. Each of the paintings comprise multiple materials such as velvet or fur sewn into the matte canvases, which hold Min’s swirling brush strokes in a raw, textural way, reminiscent of traditional Korean painting on rice paper. These materials are then beaded and woven over with dyed fabrics like Joseph’s coat of many colors.
Religious imagery is present throughout the paintings, recalling Min’s acquaintance with Christianity through Western missionaries in South Korea during his youth, while the cycles of life, death and rebirth evoke a Buddhist naturalism. His vivid childhood memories of a country in the early phases of rapid urbanization blend with his more recent experiences in California, where he moved to pursue a life as an artist and designer (Min worked for Lucasfilm in San Francisco before pursuing his own art full-time in L.A.).

As urbanization, climate change, and the natural cycles of life and death transform the artist’s physical twin homes of South Korea and California, his internal experience of those landscapes transforms with them. In the swirling paintings, we see the vortex of memory and loss; the chaos of weather, war and dreams; the sticky sweetness of love and passion fruit.
The paintings' bright colors and flowing forms are what draw you in; the intricate tableaux and textures will hold your attention. Looking at his painting “An eclipse does not come alone," Min says, "In California, people tend to see the bright side, especially when you live in L.A. Everyone’s looking for attention. Everyone wants to be a millionaire.”

He gestures toward a blazing sun above the landscape, temporarily obscured by the moon, casting the Earth below in an eerie, momentary twilight. “So you build the paradise," he continues. "But at the same time, there is inevitable destruction that comes with it. So we keep moving to the next one.

“I was given this beautiful, idealized vision of America when I was young — the America of Hollywood, of a promised land,” Min elaborates. “But then I moved here and was bombarded into the unfairness and propaganda of it all. So in these paintings I was trying to construct this world, of what I remember,and what we’ve lost, over and over. And it became this big circle of life. With these paintings, I am inviting people in and asking, ‘What’s your paradise? And if you got lost along the way, like we all do, where should we go to find the next real paradise?’”

Min’s works in The Lost Paradise captivate with their glistening forms, reminiscent of William Blake’s ecstatic figures or the lush, idealized jungles of Henri Rousseau, but the intimate moments and interconnected images keep viewers glued to the work. The effect is a feeling of awed, dizzy compassion for the world and things that live in it.

“We’re all moving. We are all immigrants in some way,” Min reflects. “So let’s be kind to each other as we move.”

Ken Gun Min: The Lost Paradise, on view through May 26, Museum of Contemporary Art, 1485 Delgany Street. Get tickets and more information at mcadenver.org.