Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, December 18, 2024: Jean Shin, an American sculptor, installation artist (#2180)

Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Artist of the Day, December 18, 2024: Jean Shin, an American sculptor, installation artist (#2180)

Jean Shin (1971) is an American artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She is known for creating elaborate sculptures and site-specific installations using accumulated cast-off materials.

Shin was born in Seoul, South Korea and moved to the United States when she was 6 years old, growing up in Bethesda, Maryland. Both of her parents who had been professors in Seoul took various jobs after moving to the Washington, D.C. area, eventually owning a supermarket and liquor store.

Shin was encouraged to pursue painting seriously in high school, and in 1990 during her senior year she entered the Presidential Scholars Program competition in the arts and won a full scholarship to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She received a B.F.A. in painting in 1994 and an M.S. in Art History and Criticism in 1996. She then worked at the Whitney Museum in New York as a curatorial assistant. Since 1998, she has taught at the Pratt Institute as an adjunct professor. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999.

Shin is best known for her labor-intensive, sculptural process of transforming accumulations of cast-off objects into visually alluring, conceptually rich works. For each project, she amasses vast collections of a particular object—prescription pill bottles, sports trophies, sweaters—which are often sourced through donations from individuals in a participating community. These intimate objects then become the materials for her sculptures, video and site-specific installations. Her works navigate the boundary between abstraction and representation, while considering both formal issues and cultural investigations.

Shin's artwork references a wide range of art historical precedents, from minimalism, with its unyielding repetition of singular forms, to feminism, with its focus on traditional craft techniques, and Arte Povera, with its connection to everyday life.

Her inventory of scavenged and obsolete materials includes worn shoes, lost socks, broken umbrellas, broken ceramics, discarded lottery tickets, and prescription pill bottles, all of which she accumulates in massive quantities. Shin then transmutes these finds through a meticulous process of deconstruction, alteration, and restoration. The resulting sculptures and installations consist of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of seemingly identical objects, each of which carries a multitude of potential meanings that inspire both personal and collective associations.

The focus shifts constantly in my installations between individual and group identity, the single unit and the larger whole, the intimate and the excessive. My elaborate work-process mirrors these dualities, as objects of mass production and consumerism are transformed through intense handmade labor.

Shin's work is included in New York City's Second Avenue Subway. In addition to Shin, fellow artists in the "extensive underground art museum funded and commissioned by MTA Arts & Design" include Chuck Close, Sarah Sze and Vik Muniz. Shin's installation "Elevated" mosaics located at the Lexington Avenue–63rd Street station is based on early-20th-century photographs of the 2nd and 3rd Avenue elevated lines from the Transit Museum and New-York Historical Society archives.

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