Jung Yeon Min’s works are highly imaginative and rich. One finds multiple worlds, the extraordinary and the realistic, notions of micro and macro, and manipulations of space and time in her work. Specifically, her work offers two equal but divergent investigations. On the one hand, she envisions and explores a mysterious and fantastical world. In a separate but concurrent investigation, she examines the effect of time in the pictorial realm. Sometimes colliding, these two points of inquiry form an intriguing basis for a closer reading of Min’s works as opening up places of potential and possibility.

Min challenges the viewers to think in possibilities or what one may be able to do when one’s imagination is stretched to the utmost. In the realm between the real and the virtual her paintings present imaginary worlds asking us to search for their specific force, their capacity for rupturing and transforming life. Tracing this force within her works offers an understanding of what her artwork achieves and her vision of our potential.

Understanding her virtual world involves questioning the very possibilities of life. Min does not want us to see her worlds simply as familiar experiences; while she uses perspective as a technique to produce a sense of comfort and familiarity, she jolts us with a sense of the strange at the same time. Her paintings show Min’s integration of the familiar world with that of the strange. While she uses perspective to demarcate the division between the world that we know and the virtual world, she emphasizes seeing strangeness in an environment that is known and safe. Moreover, Min’s use of animals and figures in her paintings give validity to this new world by controlling the scale, while her precise detailing of the various objects offers a sense of the depth and atmosphere to the world. By displaying various perspectives of time and temporality in many of her works, she seems to interrogate the concept of time and its effects. We are left questioning, what in the painting is waiting for a transformation to occur? Min never settles this question for us, leaving us unsettled about what exactly we are supposed to seeing, what we are supposed to be waiting for. Thus, she disturbs our conventional understanding of time as a progression, from one event or occurrence to another, to a more multi-layered perspective.

If we consider the metaphor of the Deleuzian rhizome, a dominant presence in Min’s works, connections between what is and what is possible come to light. Min toys with notions of the familiar and uncanny to unsettle them. The presence of realism allows the fantastical world to make sense, so what would otherwise seem strange becomes familiar and inviting. She disarms resistance to this otherness, change and difference. Her worlds offer a way of being that breaks out of boundaries, both geographical and temporal, and that challenges us to envision a life beyond convention.