The theme of national division in Korea has been addressed before in various works of art. Starting with Son Jang-sup's painting series, these also include Park Chan-kyong's Flying, which depicted the duplicity and detached perspectives of the inter-Korean relationship, and Yangachi's Middle Korea, which established a virtual state between North and South Korea. Mina Cheon's Political Pop comprises works of painting that are much simpler than these previous works, and that remain faithful to the primeval aim of art: producing images. The place occupied by North Korea in the collective unconsciousness of South Korean society, however, is too large for us to simply categories Cheon's work as pop art and judge it as a perfunctory outcome of the genre. In order to examine Cheon's North Korea-related works, we need to consider secondary factors such as the artist's physical position, looking onto South Korean society from a distance as she lives and works in the United States, and the micro-historical approach she is able to take as a female artist. In any case, critical interpretation of South Korean society as seen through the prism of North Korea is not the only point of which Cheon takes note. Rather, she directly and intuitively expresses the contemporary social understanding by which North Korea as a political symbol - not the real North Korea but the North Korea wrapped in a form aimed at hereditary power succession - is literally "consumed."  

The protagonist driving Cheon's Political Pop series is "Kim Il-soon." Kim is a character and artistic persona created by the artist - a fabrication. As such, she is an embodiment of the artist's self-image. Appearing in her works, the artist's self-image creates scenes depicting our most conventional images of North Korea - praising, marching, saluting - and repeats these scenes endlessly. This is a long way from recreating contemporary situations or criticism-based methods. On the contrary, it reduces the state of North Korea to symbols and equates the North Korean regime with our extremely biased understanding of it. The lollipop stripes and design elements that describe the space in the backgrounds of these scenes, moreover, lighten the sense of semantic burden and allow the works to escape their sense of historical weight. The repeated appearance of the artist's self-image, meanwhile, can also be partially interpreted as a way of confessing schizoid personal circumstances. The exaggerated smiles and poses do, of course, reflect what we typically imagine about North Korea and the conventional media coverage of the country, but they can also be read as a game in which the observer, excluded from specific political circumstances, plays within the framework of her own making. Cheon's works in which the artist's self-image repeatedly appears, in other words, are a satirical means of showing how prejudiced and simplistic our understanding of North Korea, a country that lies barely 50 kilometers away from Seoul, actually is. The works appear like a cold-hearted statement that the conventional images of North Korea that we have all seen repeated to the point of tedium are set to keep on coming. In this respect, Cheon's Political Pop series places very objective limits on the social and political ambitions of artworks. In fact, they appear to accept the limits of paintings by calmly dividing their artistic value and social functions. 

Perhaps the most interesting point of this exhibition is the emotional margins the artist has left by linking children to the "theatre-state" that is North Korea. The children that appear in the works are the artist's son, Georson, and daughter, Sasha, represented as characters named Kim Siun and Kim Sia, respectively. On a stage in primary shades of red and yellow, the children wear school uniforms and operate by giving automatic smiles and offering praise. Their actions, like those of Il-soon, are shown over and over again. These simple, repeated images are in no way meant to appeal to or provide comfort amid the cultural emptiness of a divided nation. On the contrary: the "realism" that cuts off the situations so neatly captured in Cheon's works becomes a powerful vagueness that touches on still-undefined sentiments.
- KWONJIN