About

Sung-Hee Min is a sculptor/public artist based in Roseville, Minnesota. She studied sculpture at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California where she earned her Fine Art's degree in 2000. In her senior year, she took an introductory welding class and became very interested in the metal medium and the process it involved. Metal and fabrication has been her primary medium and process since. She is particularly drawn to steel's strength and structural integrity. In her early career, she created works for gallery exhibitions. Her works were shown in the galleries mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as Los Angeles, Chicago and Seoul, South Korea.

Since moving to Minnesota in 2016, Min has been focusing on public art. She creates large scale sculptures that are suitable for outdoors and public viewing. Many of her works have been displayed in city art centers, park trails and sculpture walks throughout the Midwest. Her work is process-driven and can be described as minimalist, abstract, geometrical, and modular. She uses manufactured metal sheets, bars, and other shaped products. She builds her objects cumulatively and most of them are self-supporting structures. She relates this process to quilting in that a small shape or a unit of small shapes is repeated into a larger area. She finds this accumulative way of building rewarding and more sustainable. Geometry is a theme that ties her work. She likes using geometrical shapes for their universal familiarity and recognition. Working with geometry allows little room for mistakes and intuitive changes in the process yet, she enjoys the clarity of intended forms in the finished work.

Min grew up in rural South Korea where agriculture was the main livelihood at the time. Rice fields were everywhere and she loved seeing the farmers planting rice seedlings in the fields early spring. Walking along the rice fields to school and seeing the fields changing colors from light green to golden yellow is a fond memory. Another of her favorite childhood memory is her father once taking her to the construction site of the house she grew up in, in the late 1970s. As was customary in Korea at the time, a brief ceremony was held at the site marking the completion of the main framework. The skeletal lumber structure which was suggestive of the house to be was a fascinating sight to her and left a lasting impression. Oftentimes, she revisits this memory when she creates her work in the studio.