MINJEONG AN

Early Years

Born in Chorwon in 1981 and now living and working in Seoul, Minjeong An achieved her BFA in 2005 and her MFA in 2008 (both in Fine Arts) from the Seoul National University of Technology. A core childhood memory inspired an early work, The Power of a Kiss (2008)—she writes on her website that she found it hard to walk to primary school on her own, but held on to the feeling of the goodbye kiss from her mother. “When I was tired to walk on the way to school, I recharged the power of mom’s kiss saved on my face,” she says. She also references childhood in Detailed Map of my House (2015), which features the small room where she lived alongside her parents, siblings and grandmother between 1981–1990.

Minjeong An: Artworks

Minjeong An’s detailed diagrammatic artworks “visualise invisible things” by using trusted, recognisable mathematical and scientific symbols to unravel complex human emotions. She utilises the language and formulas of science to create factual answers to questions raised about personal relationships and feelings, and concentrates on visualising and quantifying abstract concepts and energies.

She values the beauty of lines and labelling as carriers of information and was inspired by an architectural blueprint she found while working as a web designer, in which she could see that every element of the drawing had its own meaning. For her first Self-Portrait (2007) she measured her body parts, detailing scars and moles as well as length and angle. She has also explained that drawing halo-like curves around her figure’s head was a way of quantifying her aura. “It would be fun to draw a blueprint with my face,” Minjeong An said in a 2018 interview. “Make my teeth as stairs, and nostrils as doorways.”

• Six-Membered Family Portrait: All Goes Well (2008) interprets a Korean family motto (When one’s home is harmonious, all goes well) via concentric circles underneath which all the family members are connected as one single human body.
• The Study on Mother’s Hand and Wind of Healing (2013/2025) was originally created in 2013 and zones in on love, relationships and emotions through a semicircular diagram featuring hands holding hands. The work was newly presented at the 2025 Seoul Mediacity Biennale.
• Rachaph (Self-Portrait) (2024) is the story of Minjeong An herself, featuring scars from childhood bee stings and even her underwear size. She says on her website: “This piece is a work made by imagining what I would look like if I were to redraw myself and transfer it into a diagram.”
• Minjeong An reproduces a large-scale human body rich in diagrammatic detail in Postpartum Care Centre Detailed Diagram (2026), a moving, brutally honest work about the period after the birth of her second child, depicting the physical and physiological changes she underwent

Minjeong An: Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Private Pictograph, Staniar Gallery, Washington and Lee University, Virginia (2025)
• Engineering of memories, The gallery D, Hongcheon, (2018)

Select Group Exhibitions

• Unapologetic, p21, Seoul (2026)
• Flesh and Bones: the Art of Anatomy, ArtScience Museum, Singapore (2026)
• Exoskeleton, p21, Seoul (2024)

Further reading

• Minjeong An’s website
• Washington and Lee University’s page about the Private Pictograph exhibition in 2025
• Minjeong An’s Instagram
• A 2012 profile from Huffpost

Minjeong An FAQs

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