Shin
Min

Min Shin lives and works in Seoul. She questions how a societal problem can be translated into visual art. Shin talks about the systematized injustice in Korean society.
Using the “papier-mâché” technique, Shin modulates female figurines and reinforces this fragile and crumplable material by drawing in graphite pencil. These round and naive figurines sport an expression of anger. Shin denounces the way in which the female body is perceived in Korean society as elsewhere. The voluntarily chosen ugliness serves to reverse this alienating gaze. They are not there to be looked at but to look. By looking back, they regain their dignity.
At each exhibition, Shin names his figurines during a ritual and slips a small folded letter into the body of his sculptures. These figurines are the duplicates of the artist as a woman, but they are also our own portrait, imperfect, precarious. This work carries a message of consolation and attempts to explode the systematic aspect of our perception.