Description: A 1000 piece puzzle featuring the artwork of acclaimed Korean-born, Los Angeles-based artist Ken Gun Min.
Ken Gun Min's paintings explore intimacy, masculinity, and representation across cultures, while employing a mixture of western-style oil paints, Korean pigments, embroidery, and beading on raw canvas. Often featuring nude and queer-coded men, his portraits and lush landscapes concoct fanciful idylls where longing, melancholy, and euphoria manifest irrespective of expectations imposed on people in daily life. This 1000-piece puzzle features his work.Brief description: Ken Gun Min (b. 1976, Seoul, South Korea; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) studied western painting and art history and theory at Hongik University in Seoul, Korea and received his MFA from the Academy of Art, University of San Francisco.
Review Quotes: "Kinstler is releasing a new puzzle of Korean artist Ken Gun Min's 2023 painting "Stranger by the Lake (Bare Ass Creek)," an homage to a nude sunbathing spot in Los Angeles that was destroyed in a 2009 fire. Min, too, has loved playing with puzzles since he was a child. He was fascinated by the fact that individual fragments didn't make visual sense until he fitted them together. Now he sees comparisons between the visual riddles and his current practice."--Aaron Short "Hyperallergic"