The Seoul exhibition is divided into two parts; one half features portraits of Michèle Lamy, the multihyphenate creative whose husband is fashion designer Rick Owens. “I’m not looking for pretty girls; I’m looking for people with a kind of character to them,” says Minter of Lamy’s dark, unique look. “She was avant-garde before everyone else—I just liked the way she looked,” she continues, citing Lamy’s gold-plated, diamond-studded teeth and inked hands as specific elements that appeal. “You know, she appears intimidating, and yet she’s the most motherly, warm, lovely person.

“It’s hard to find an old lady who hasn’t had any work done,” the artist continues, then pauses for a minute. “I guess she has had work done, but it’s not the kind of work that society approves of.” Minter is especially curious to see how her work will be perceived in Seoul—a city which has commoditised a specific idea of beauty and spread those beauty standards globally.

The second half of the Seoul exhibition features paintings based on photos of a mixed-race, freckled Filipino girl, her latest muse, who has been making a name as a make-up model. “I have always gravitated towards and tried to promote the careers of models from diverse backgrounds; it speaks to the times we live in. Mixed race is the current and the future,” she says.

Even though her interests lie in finding new ways to explore unconventional beauty, Minter’s mainstream recognition and art-world acclaim have led to commissions to photograph cultural personalities such as Lady Gaga, Gloria Steinem and artist Mickalene Thomas. Most recently, she shot Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore for a magazine covering their latest film May December (2023). “Natalie really doesn’t take a bad picture, and Julianne is exquisite. I’ve shot her before and we’re friends at this point, so it was joy to shoot them both,” the artist tells Tatler from her New York studio, where she had just completed the photoshoot.

Her interest in the entertainment and beauty industries stems from examining their inherent characteristics: how they function by both preying on and profiting from our desires and insecurities. “I see how much contempt the world has for glamour and beauty. It’s this giant, billion-dollar industry that’s considered superficial. It’s shallow but it gives people pleasure. It’s a real engine of the culture; it’s a place where women can and often do have real power, but at the same time it can create body dysmorphia,” she says. “It’s a real metaphor for the times we live in. I want these two different opposite ideas in everything I do. We have to be able to tolerate complexity.”

In a similar vein, by straddling the art world and mainstream preferences, Minter and her work serve as a bridge connecting high and low culture. It’s interesting to see celebrities though her lens; simultaneously, the celebs’ popularity provides a familiar point of entry into her own work; she aims to make her art accessible to wide-ranging audiences, and “doesn’t want to burden [viewers] with learning a new art language”.

Seemingly disparate and often opposing elements are integral to her creative process. “I try and make everything as beautiful as possible, even if it might not seem that way to most people. But I’m going to make it gorgeous,” she says.

We ask Minter why her process so often incorporates water. She reflects quietly for a moment, before saying: “I like the way things look all wet. I think they look sexier. There’s something really alluring about how light reflects off water.” She cites filmmakers’ fascination with creating scenes using water, whether a rainstorm or a fogged-up bathroom mirror, to enhance sensuality. “It’s a way to highlight distortion,” she says.

How water’s intrinsic flowing quality allows for reflections to warp and change also interests her and serves as a metaphor for how image isn’t definitive and our perceptions can be faulty. In fact, Minter’s process mimics how we construct and consume images, most evidently by photographing her subjects through glass screens. “You have to acknowledge that everything we look at is behind screens. It always was: even when you’re taking a shower, you’re behind a curtain or doors. The ads you look at on streets are behind glass; sometimes consumed with beauty and youth.

Screens, both physical and digital, merge with this aquatic theme in her latest work, Thirsty (2023), which is a water fountain set to be installed as a part of a presentation for Art Basel Hong Kong's Kabinett Sector at the end of this month. Above the custom-made, stainless steel drinking fountain is a basin through which a video is projected, drawing the viewer in. The video is a close-up of a freckled adult woman’s mouth, her teeth in braces, blowing bubbles in slow motion.

The title and work itself have numerous connotations that teasingly reference how we both consume and are consumed with beauty and youth. From “drinking at the fountain of youth” to the social media-created term of being “thirsty” for, or lusting after, someone, uses topical language and aesthetics. “It’s just the way I could make the images that I was interested in, but turn them into 21st-century imagery,” Minter says of her process. “What could I make in the time I live in that makes sense?”

Even though audiences were less receptive to Minter’s work decades ago, the artist is now vindicated, as her images resonate with people across different generations. It was only in 2006 that the artist started becoming acclaimed and commercially popular, after participating in the Whitney Biennial, when her painting graced the cover of the catalogue and was featured in all its ads. Around the same time, her work was on Creative Time billboards, a series of public art project, around New York’s Chelsea district.

“When people see my early work, more and more, they start to get it. It speaks to your generation [Millennials and Gen Z] before it speaks to mine; I saw things before people could see them,” the artist says.

Minter is grateful her work is appreciated by younger people, but also acutely aware of how the art world functions, particularly with regard to her only finding success late on in her career. “The art world loves old ladies, dead ladies, and they love young bad boys,” she says half-jokingly. Female artists such as Carmen Herrera, Helen Frankenthaler and Louise Nevelson were, until very recently, written out of art history; Minter says she didn’t learn about them growing up, adding it’s only now that they’re getting their due: “Everyone loves them as old ladies or dead ladies.” She is keen to do her part to prevent history repeating itself, so is extra vocal in her praise and support of younger female artists. “Dana Schutz is a killer artist. I just saw one of her shows and it’s one of the best I’ve seen. She’s going to be famous her whole life—she’s not going to get written out.”

After more than 50 years behind the lens, Minter has got in front of it to make a self-portrait, her first in her signature style, exclusively for Tatler—she wanted to have fun and stick to her ideals of finding beauty in unexpected ways. “I didn’t put on any make-up, I didn’t get dressed up for it; I didn’t even wear contacts. The idea was to keep it loose and abstract, and not try and get fancy.”

For the next chapter of her creative career, Minter wants to continually turn her lens on powerful female figures such as Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Maria Ressa and Jane Goodall, or, as she puts it, “people who are going to do something moving forward as a human species—anybody like that.”

Minter’s work counters the worst sociopolitical developments in recent times. “This is a bad period. Believe me, it’s one of the worst. We’re just taking steps back; I can’t imagine being able to put all these genies back in the bottle.” Despite the general global upheaval, though, she still maintains a mindset she adopted from a friend and ultimate feminist icon a long time ago: “I’ve learnt from Gloria [Steinem] to be a hope-a-holic.”

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