The Brooklyn Rail

Kyungmi Shin’s Monsters, Vases and The Priest at Sperone Westwater is an act of ceremony. Moving between timelines, the artist has collapsed the space of images through painting to form an important site for contemplation; for gathering distant experiences and ushering them into the present. In understanding her family lineage she avoids self-mythologizing and instead, more broadly, examines the beauty and dignity of the Asian experience.

It is a powerful language of restoration that processes her own family’s pursuit of happiness against the reductive colonial languages of chinoiserie and ornamentalism. This sharp relief produces vibrant moments of difference, of the moire and overlap produced between cultures that remains abstract, indeterminate, but necessary to try to understand. Kyungmi’s careful visual empathy that she has developed between painting and images is striking. She uses mark and pixel to blur the distinction between them to create a density of projection and overlay which allows her to incorporate her extensive archive into her painting practice.

Andrew Woolbright (Rail): Kyungmi, thank you for putting on such a phenomenal show. There’s so much to get to, so I want to jump right in. I feel research plays such a vital role within your painting practice. And I want to go back to the beginning of your art practice, when art started to take hold as a part of your life. And specifically, I’m wondering how much your education at Berkeley may have played a role.

Kyungmi Shin: The body of work that I’m presenting began about four to five years ago, when I started to use my family photo archive. So even though I’m making paintings, at the basis of the work is photography. I started to use my family photo archive as a way to investigate my own family history in the beginning. But soon I realized that these old photographs held a lot of meaning as a historical record. So I started to look at the larger historical forces at play in the backgrounds of the photos.

When I look back at my own history of art-making, I had used my family photographs in the portfolio that I made for grad school twenty-five years ago. Initially, I was using photographs in combination with sculptural objects. The photos were of my late mother who had passed away a few years prior as a way to reflect on her life. Fast forward twenty-five years, I am now investigating my father’s life. And so it feels like these two bodies of work are bookends.

What I am learning about myself as I reflect on my new works is that during the years that happened in between, I have grown as a person and as an artist, and my decades-long experience as an artist and as a student of history has allowed me to create a body of work that is more complex. My intention in my new work is to embrace the complexity of history and to create juxtapositions of narratives that might have been hidden or not considered together in the larger story of the connected worlds that we live in.

Rail: So you’re using photography as kind of a fixed point that allows you to be fluid and change along with it. I know it’s case by case, but I’m wondering how you approach the images, because it sounds like in the case of your mother and your father, you’re dealing with an image which is what is left of an absence or something that’s no longer there. How are you thinking about the painting? Is painting an act of recovery? Or how are you dealing with an image? Does it feel like it states the person as you remember them, or how are you—

Shin: I like your expression, “painting as an act of recovery.” I think I use the painted images as a way to introduce narratives that have direct relationships to the photograph. Sometimes it is to contradict and collide with the photographic images; and I create relationships by the way I juxtapose them. So there definitely is a dialogue that happens between the photographic and the painted parts of the work. Within the painted elements, there are multiple images that I introduce from different historical sources which creates another layer of narratives. Those relationships are something that I’m paying very close attention to. So in addition to the relationship to the photograph, different elements in the painting also are positioned to engage with each other and challenge each other. And, sometimes, they are paired to introduce conflict. I guess I am trying to introduce these historical elements to make it more apparent. A lot of the narratives I am using are hidden from the canons of history and art history, and thus not investigated. So I’m using these images to emphasize certain relationships.

Rail: I was really struck by the synthesis between painting and images within your work. I have such a strong association with paintings that use image transfers, and you can usually tell what part is image transfer and what isn’t. And I feel like you’ve really accommodated the image where the paint and the pixel kind of vibrate in a way that it’s difficult to see where one ends and one begins. And I kept thinking this is an artist that has really developed an empathy towards images. Tell me if I’m wrong in this characterization, but it feels like you’re using painting in a way to kind of understand and catch up to the fidelity of the image, and then the brush is aligning with the language of the image in so many places.

Shin: Wow, I love that. I think in some cases, I am almost wanting to create that tension between photographic image and the painted image. In the piece Bitter Oriental (all works 2023), you see a group of young Korean men, including my father, standing, and I’ve gotten rid of the background in the photo. So a group of these photographic figures are standing in the middle of the painted field. And then in between the photographic figures, I juxtaposed faces from a Rococo chinoiserie tapestry by François Boucher peeking through, and I love how that collapse of time and space happens between the two groups of portraits.

Rail: Your color palette also makes that collapse of time in image and paint align. That one does feel to me as though it involves more pastiche in that tension and conflict. I like that piece a lot. There’s something really interesting about these groups of men, all wearing business suits. What’s the story behind that?

Shin: A lot of these photos that I’ve used include my father, and my father was a Christian minister. Many of the photos that I’m using, including this piece, are from his graduation trip.

These are young, newly ordained, Korean, Protestant ministers who are on their graduation trip, and they had an official photographer, so there are a lot of photos—including casual and unofficial images like them hanging out or walking on the street. And some photos have a very interesting cinematic or historical painting quality. A few of the photos reminded me of paintings of Jacques-Louis David—figures standing and doing heroic things next to each other and filling the horizontal picture plane in a condensed space. I like to use these photos because I really love how dignified they look. And I’m always looking for an alternative narrative for Asian bodies. I love how they look very confident, heroic, and about to embark on the journey of their professional lives. Their faces are full of hope. So I love these photos in how they represent Asian characters in a very dignified way.

Rail: It really struck me how powerful their relation was, as a critique of and a dimensionalizing of the chinoiserie, which is often a visual language that denies subjecthood. It flattens and visualizes Asian culture as a fantasy space, an elsewhere rather than a here, and doesn’t engage with it as a complex experience. The dignity of your father and his classmates really becomes even more elevated in relation to the chinoiserie’s camp. Powerful. Is that how you’re thinking of it?

Shin: Yeah, that is definitely part of the conversation. And of course, we could have a long conversation just about the chinoiserie as well, which is very complex, but definitely I am creating these relationships to contradict the narratives of the chinoiserie, which objectifies and turns humans into decorations. And so a really interesting conversation happens by juxtaposing these images.

Rail: You have a painting titled the ornamental. I’d love to hear you describe and define the ornamental, how you’re thinking about ornamentation within your practice.

Shin: Actually, I have to say this title was very much inspired by Anne Anlin Cheng’s book Ornamentalism. Have you read that?

Rail: I haven’t. It’s on the list.

Shin: I just started to read her book a few months ago, and I was really struck by how her research and my research had a lot of overlap. I hadn’t really thought of the chinoiserie as that specific term, the ornamental, before her book, so it was powerful to re-engage the images I had been using through that lens. In her book, she talks about the Asian female body as the ornament, but I think it also generally applies to the depiction of the Orient and Asian bodies both male and female, imagined through the gaze of exotification. Chinoiserie is part of that language, and this exotification of Asian landscapes, bodies, and cultures continues to this day. So I was thinking about that history of looking at Asia or the Orient through this lens of ornamentation. So that is the inspiration for the title of this piece. Should I describe to you a little bit of the details in the work?

Rail: I’d love that. I’d love to go deep into them.

Shin: So the photograph depicts two sisters. In addition to my family photographs, I am also using, especially in the smaller works upstairs, photographs of these sisters. The family album was found in an abandoned chemistry lab when I was in grad school at UC Berkeley. It was a whole family album. It was a bit strange to see somebody’s family album in an abandoned space. And it was unclear whether it was abandoned or left behind by mistake, but the fact that they didn’t claim it was really strange. These labs were abandoned for decades by the time we got to them (the photos are mostly from the thirties and forties). Our grad studios were off campus at a location called the Richmond Field Station, and it had multiple science labs, some active, but others were abandoned labs. Many of us would go into these abandoned labs to try to see if we could find any mixed media material. Since I use photographs in my work, the album was kind of gifted to me, and my colleagues said, you do something with it. But I really haven’t found a project to do something meaningful until now.

What was remarkable about these photographs was the beauty of the images. I really thought they looked like film stills. They’re really beautiful photographs describing the lives of six Chinese sisters. According to the Chinese text written behind the photos, a few of which I had a friend translate for me, a few sisters were back in Asia and others were living in or visiting the US. And I am assuming one of them must have a relationship to Berkeley. I always thought these were like Chinese Cindy Sherman photographs, because they depicted everyday life yet in elevated visuals as in film stills. I loved how this is also an alternative narrative description about Asian bodies.

So these two sisters are standing in front of a car looking confident, maybe defiant, like Thelma and Louise. In this piece, I wanted to use images that depicted women, both in the photo and in the different female mythological creatures used in the work. On the lower right corner is a silver line painting of a Harpy. In some depictions of the Harpies, they also have arms with musical instruments, and the harpy is a dangerous seductress. And then on the lower left is the three headed bird, a traditional Korean shaman talisman, that is meant for good luck. I’ve always been fascinated with this three-headed bird, and it also reminded me of another potent religious symbol, an old wooden religious sculpture I saw at Kolumba Museum in Cologne, of the three-headed depiction of the Christian Trinity, representing the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. I thought it was a really fascinating schizophrenic presence. So this shamanistic three-headed bird adds a certain potency to the narrative of the piece. The background painting is a chinoiserie landscape, and embedded on the left side in the landscape is a Korean shaman goddess. I wanted her to have a kind of an overall presence, hidden but empowering the whole section on the left side. Some of the floral details in the landscape are from the Korean painting, and some of the colorful ones are from the chinoiserie painting.

Rail: I love that connection you make in the work between the Christian Trinity and the Korean shaman talisman. How the polyphonic voice spoke in unison expands as an idea across cultures. That leads me to a question I had walking through the show, knowing that there’s the talisman, there’s good luck, there’s the priest as the shaman, who also as a priest may be the representation of your father. I’m wondering how you view these images, because you brought up this idea of camouflage or the ability to embed things, and you’re thinking about how some of the imagery should be barely perceptible. Do you view your role as the artist as protecting the people in these images? Or is this something else that you’re doing in the gallery space?

Shin: I’m not sure if protecting is the word, but I definitely want the photographic characters to have a very dignified presence. So maybe that’s part of the protection. What I’m hoping by using photographic images is for the subjects to be part of a larger conversation about this history. And what I’ve learned through the use of my own family photographs is that a photographic image captures a particular moment in time where so many historical forces are at work. So I feel like I am honoring that hidden history by juxtaposing historical images and paintings with the photos.

In terms of the historical narratives, I am not only honoring but also I am problematizing a lot of these relationships through juxtaposition. A lot of times I juxtapose the Western spiritual icons with Korean shamanistic icons, because I’m thinking about the movement of religion and how the religion becomes globalized, which is wonderful from the religious perspective, but maybe not so wonderful from the native religious perspective. But that is a fact of life. So I am questioning all these things that we might take for granted. Why is this religion here as opposed to there, and what has it done to the native belief system? I think movement of anything creates disruptions: movement of objects or peoples, and then religion is one of the biggest disruptors, right? So by juxtaposing these icons, I would like to make that relationship more evident or questioned more out loud.

Rail: I think that that is one of the things that makes the show so successful in my mind. It really is dealing with this cultural sublime—these monumental collisions and crossings that we know will have effects that we won’t be able to know or understand for generations. Framing these movements as a kind of postmodern sublime, an awe at the inability to really know the consequences of these things, feels like it shapes a space for handling the complexity of these events.

I grew up very religious. And something I think about often is how I replaced religion with painting, which both kind of operate in a similar way [laughter]: something parallel to language that has an ability to circulate and disrupt and embed. I’m wondering if that’s why you chose painting for this show? Or, why are you attracted to researching through painting when you are also a sculptor, and there might be more literal ways to manipulate images and interrogate the archive. On the surface, painting is usually so resistant to ideas and research. Your show feels like it needed to be a language of painting, but I guess what I’m saying is that might not have been an obvious choice. I wonder what attracted you to making this form of research and these complex questions about globalization in your own family history, but also a larger Asian identity—why painting felt like the format for you to explore that through.

Shin: In my history, the painting practice is a part of a larger picture. I also have a body of work in ceramics where I’m dealing with similar investigation, or I should say the ceramic works complement the 2D works in this body of work. I think the ceramic projects were inspired by the chinoiserie objects I was seeing in museums and palaces, and, of course, all the porcelain objects exported to Europe from China kick-started the global connection between Asia, especially China, and Europe. And in my earlier works, the installation works, before I started to deal with chinoiserie, I was looking at the global connection through trades and the movement of objects and bodies. I was dealing with that subject matter in installations which also included videos, found material, and photos.

As I try to do my own forensic analysis of my own decision making process in response to your question, I think, because I was using photographs, it made sense to do something two dimensional. And I also have a history of making wallpaper patterns created using media images. For instance, I would turn a photograph from a newspaper article into a wallpaper pattern, to create an environment that surrounds you, but that also disappears. Only on close inspection, you realize the pattern is composed of a very problematic, challenging or interesting image. With this history of working with patterns, my initial interest in looking at the chinoiserie was to create a wallpaper like patterns using chinoiserie imagery. But soon I wanted to make conversations that were more complex. So I would trace a photograph of a chinoiserie sculpture, and use that tracing as painted lines on top of photographic images which were presented against chinoiserie patterns. That layering kind of began as a way to introduce more conversations. I think the 2D materiality of the photograph had pushed me into dealing with more 2D images to juxtapose, and what I found was that this layering and combination of narratives had so much potential to create a very epic story. So I kept going. My work is very painterly, but it’s also very sculptural. The way I do the photo transfer is that the photographic image is suspended in layers of acrylic media. So I have a lot of layers of media and sanding in between, before I can even start painting. It’s a very sculptural process because it’s very physical.

Rail: I also think it needs to be worked through painting because like you said, your painting really rewards close looking. You know, it operates and performs one way at a distance, it does announce itself as more decorative. And then the closer you get, like you said, you realize that you’re dealing with a really interrogated space. You’re dealing with trauma, pain, a coding of power, a wrestling of idealizations and ornament and one group inscribing another, and it’s demonstrating the ways that aesthetics can do all these really complex and painful things. The thing that you enjoyed from a distance is now complicating itself and really revealing something unsettled beneath it, but it still has the pleasure of painting within it to keep you there, too. And that all feels like it has to be or is necessary or necessitates this painting.

Shin: Yes, yes. Before our conversation, I was thinking about how I might summarize my work in a simple way. And I came to describe it like this. My work is about the poetics and the brutality of the connected worlds. Because so much violence happens when one group encounters another, and I think it happens when any different groups collide. But then the aftermath of that sometimes creates something quite interesting. The Créolité which Glissant talks about, or hybridity. When I first learned about chinoiserie twenty-some years ago, I felt like I was a chinoiserie in a way, an embodiment of different cultures mixed inside me. And I think, as a contemporary American, a lot of people embody that, the hybridity of different cultures within our lifestyle, in our palate, in our interests. So I feel like there’s brutality, but there’s also the poetics of the culture that was borne out of this brutality. In a way I am dealing with that in my work. The beauty that I employ is from the visual culture traditions I am quoting, and what I try to elicit is heightened awareness about these collisions.

Rail: Yeah, they maintain a distance from assumption. You’re really observing these crossings, without forming a moral position on them. I recently had a conversation with Candice Lin, and she brought up the book Ghostly Matters by Avery Gordon, which speaks about haunting as an anthropological framework. The ghost is an absence of something that once was, that then returns as something unfamiliar. A haunting, then, is an acknowledgment of space no longer operating as it should, an acknowledgment of something being temporally unsettled. Haunting can then be a productive haunting. It’s the lingering knowledge that something is unresolved. After that conversation with Candice, I’ve been thinking more and more about it. Brian O’Doherty talks about the white cube. We’ve since progressed through the black cube of video works and the gray cube that stages both objects and media, and I’m wondering if the current function of the gallery is a kind of haunted cube? In the last few years the gallery feels like it functions as a spectral site that has to reconcile us with our past so that we can begin mapping a future. I wonder if you relate to that in your work? Is there a spectrality that’s trying to hold us to an account? Or is this really about—more closely to what you said—finding the camouflage or hybridity or Créolité within? I guess I’m asking, do you feel like there is something that you want the audience to really have to deal with?

Shin: In a way, I think, as an artist, I do feel the limits of what the artwork can do as an active instigator in the sense that, you know, maybe sometimes it’s better to stand on the street and protest. I understand I’m not doing a performance piece, which might be much more effective, to say something politically in protest. I am very cognizant of the fact that I’m making an aesthetic object. So within the confines of that, I am instigating and trying to bring up questions. I think there’s really no specific answer to any of these. I think what I try to do is to bring up questions that people can start thinking about. “Haunting" as a descriptive word is useful to understand a lot of the elements in my work but actually, I don’t know if I like it. It’s really interesting. [Laughs]

I think I am dealing with this haunting history that is visually or casually absent. But if you pay attention it is there. It is really a powerful word. That’s why I’m having a bit of a reaction to it as well, but maybe it is the haunting nature of the history that we’re talking about.

Rail: Maybe using a word from earlier that you mentioned is better here. Maybe it’s less a haunting and more a ceremony. There’s a lecture Jan Verwoert gives where he talks about how art’s function is similar to that of a ceremony—like a wedding or an anniversary. The ancestors come to the party to commune with the grandchildren. Its lineage but as a gathering point—specifically a celebration. There’s dancing. It’s revelry. A moment of loosening and gathering across time.

Shin: I love the metaphor of the ceremony in describing art. Also going back to your earlier comment about your art replacing your religion, I also always felt that the art world is very much like the religious world in that you work within a parameter, a belief system, a structure, and perform inside those. So I agree with Jan Verwoert’s position that art’s function is similar to ceremony because I think there are understood and agreed upon rules and parameters in creating art objects. Artists can work within or disrupt those rules, but I believe all art productions are linked to these parameters.

Rail: I’m wondering how film and the montage and the cut specifically might play a role within these parameters in your work. And also, you brought up Cindy Sherman, does your work have a relationship to the Pictures Generation? There also may be some superficial similarities of instigating and interrogating images to the strategies of Sigmar Polke or Sarah Charlesworth. But I’m also wondering if there are any other artists or films that you feel have a communication within your practice?

Shin: You’re talking about the Pictures Generation, and I’ve always worked with photographs, but as a “snapshot photographer”. I’ve at different points had a medium-format camera, and was using a large-format camera as well. But I always thought of myself as a snapshot photographer, because I don’t know how to focus and control details on demand, so I always have to use auto mode to be efficient. But I’ve always been really inspired by a lot of the photographers in the Pictures Generation. And I think it’s because of their ability to talk about contemporary lives and the media. I don’t think about film so much when I’m composing the work but I am really much more indebted to the collage tradition. I was inspired by American collagists like Romare Bearden and German artists like Hannah Höch. And I am very much indebted to Sigmar Polke’s practice also. In some cases, I think of my paintings as an installation space or a sculptural space. Because I build the space inside the image as if I’m building layers of space. And it’s a way to collapse all these spaces and times into one picture plane. So that’s how I think of the composition of my work: I have these different spatial layers on top of each other.

Rail: That’s fascinating. It does seem like they’re kind of misbehaving paintings.

Shin: [Laughs]

Rail: They’re paintings that also perform as images and photography, also as decorative pattern. They also feel like scans. And you’re thinking of them as performing as sculptural spaces. There’s also such a strong drawing element to these.

Shin: At the end of the day, I consider these pieces paintings. But I think also, maybe the definition of painting is much larger than it has to be. And that’s actually what’s also wonderful about painting is that there’s so many possibilities of different ways of making them. Also I am really constructing these pieces like traditional paintings. They’re on gessoed wood panel surfaces. So I am bringing all my methods, conversations, and techniques into the painting language.

Rail: I want to talk about your use of line and drawing, specifically in moments like in superfluity of things. You have a still life and then you’ve transposed drawing on top of the still life that’s on top of the set table. That was one of my favorite paintings in the show. Am I correct that pomegranates are an import into Korea? In which case that would also make it another signifier for globalization and international trade. How are you thinking about your overlaid drawing in relationship to this kind of standard still life painting? And what becomes the overlay versus what becomes the structure underneath?

Shin: It is a comment on the tradition of still life painting as well as a way to highlight how the global trades are represented in these still life traditions. At the center is a Dutch still life by Jacob Van Hulsdonck from the early 1600s. The picture represents the metaphor of fleeting life, but also it shows so much more. The fruits are in a blue-and-white Chinese porcelain bowl. Dutch still life showcased a lot of the imported objects and what was circulated through the Dutch East India Company. So it shows the evidence of the commercial connection to Asia, and of course, the pomegranate is an import (which I believe originated in Central Asia).

And there’s another layer of still life, silver lines painted on top of the Dutch Still life, is a Korean still life tradition, Chaekgeori. And what’s fascinating about Chaekgeori paintings is that some Korean scholars call them Korean chinoiserie paintings, because they always include imported Chinese porcelain objects. As opposed to European chinoiserie that turns the imported porcelains and lacquered panels into European objects, in the Chaekbeori paintings, they are used to show the worldliness of the owner of the paintings. In the painting I am using, there’s a peacock feather, which was also most likely imported. I’ve seen a Chaekgeori painting with a German clock featured proudly at the center. So I love how Chaekgeori again shows the connected world. Chaekgeori paintings also typically showcase fruits as a way to introduce symbols of good luck, fertility, and abundance, and pomegranates are used very frequently as well. So I love the different kinds of meaning making and how these overlaps exist.

The photograph at the bottom shows stacked fruits and dried fruits in a shaman ritual. Most likely, this is the opening of a business. They usually have a big pig’s head and this still life-like setup with abundant food, to appease the gods. Shamanic rituals like this were very common in old Korea to ensure success of any new venture. This particular photo is from a friend’s family archive who generously shared it with me. The set up to me felt like another form of still life, but one with a very different kind of meaning and power embedded in the image. I wanted to collapse all these different still life traditions on top of each other.

Rail: I love how in some of the paintings it really took a while to unravel these different tensions and collapsing moments, but for this one, it also felt just really vibrant. I really enjoyed how the gold and silver line that you’re using becomes a camouflage—you can walk around the painting and you lose it for a moment. The shimmer is a rich metaphor. There’s been so much writing about how the role of the Dutch still life is to geographically center it as the central axis of global trade. I like how the faint spectral silver drawing is a different centering, that it’s like a double valent centering of two subjectivities together, a metaphysical overlay of different centers and gravities.

Shin: I love the way you are describing it: a different centering. My work definitely tries to shift the center.

Rail: I feel like that’s also a really powerful motif within your work—this centering but also this staggering effect. It’s like a temporal and geographic moire pattern. What gets thrown off when the overlay isn’t synced up. That in-between space is really important, where you’re trying to see the duck and rabbit at once—these kinds of incommensurate vibrations take hold, and it feels like you’re trying to keep us in that space for as long as possible.

Shin: Yeah, the metallics definitely help me to introduce an alchemical presence. So the image is there, and then it’s not there, depending on the angle you’re looking at the work, so the metallic line paintings have an elusive and alive quality.

Rail: Your description of this painting in particular also makes me wonder if this painting isn’t operating in another way. This layering of still life-still life-still life is acting the way Kosuth’s chair did, but instead of an interrogation of object, image, and definition, it’s an interrogation of cultural definition. The work feels very textual, and that might go back to how much of your practice begins with and works with research.

Shin: [Laughs] So these paintings are conceptual works after all! The conceptual approach to artmaking is how I began my serious practice as an artist, so it is very stimulating to hear you mention Kosuth’s chair in describing my work. In superfluity of things, I am definitely doing Kosuth in a different set of interrogations of meanings. I have made conceptual and textual works when I was in graduate school. I think I am a more efficient builder of images when I don’t solely rely on logical choices. I try to push beyond logic and make leaps and discover new possibilities that way. But I try to have a rigor in my construction so the work has dense, meaningful conversations inside itself. Research is a big part of my preparatory process behind the work, and my curiosity, indignation, and fascination about the diasporic movements of peoples and objects and the aftermath of those movements fuel my work.

Rail: The second floor is your “Invisible Women” series. Spatially I feel like the space of your “Invisible Women” series operates very differently than the paintings on the ground floor. And I’m wondering how you’re thinking of that, or how you’re thinking of the structuring of the image in relationship to the images of your father. They feel more veiled to me, or more like disbanding the color channels, a kind of striping, rather than the mise en abyme, or the image within the image of the other works. It feels like this banding or striping of different realities.

Shin: That’s a really interesting question. In a way, I wasn’t very conscious of that difference, but what I was very conscious of was the scale, as these works are smaller in scale. I was very aware of the intimate quality of the smaller size work and I wanted to use the more intimate portraits for these. In terms of the composition, I wanted to introduce two different worlds, but the canvas was too small to have a whole new picture within it, so by dividing the picture plane into two sections, or multiple sections, I was able to introduce different spaces or deal with different spaces.

Rail: Well, it makes sense that it arrived through scale. It just wouldn’t work the same way as the larger horizontal works. The horizontal works on the first floor and this more square, rectangular, grid-based space, you’ve solved it through this kind of curtaining or veiling. I’m wondering, while we’re getting really into formal decisions, where does color come in for the work? Like, where does the attraction of color come in, how are you thinking of it? Is it an early step in the process? Or is it a later step in the collage?

Shin: For this body of work, especially the pieces downstairs that were made recently, I was very conscious of the colors—more than I had been before. I wanted to reference the Rococo colors, because one of the biggest visual forces during Rococo was the chinoiserie aesthetic. So I wanted to create this very Rococo feel in the whole show. There’s a lot of pinks and powder blue. But first the colors are based on the specific images that I was quoting—the majority of the background images are chinoiserie paintings and some Korean paintings, then I pushed the colors.

Rail: How do you define a monster? How do you define a vase? And how do you define a priest?

Shin: [Laughs] I love that. Wow.

Rail: And also, where are you within that system? Or how do you operate between those three things?

Shin: Between the monster, the vase, and the priest?

Rail: Do you feel an affinity or an alliance towards one? Do you protect one from the other? Are you the curator or the channel in between them?

Shin: That’s such a powerful and insightful question. Because I think in a way I have all of the three elements within me. I think that the vase for me represents—the movement. Vases represent objects that moved between cultures—as objects of trade, as objects of culture. I feel like my life as an immigrant has had similar movements. And the priest is partially about the missionary colonial movement, but it is also about spirituality. I am not practicing Korean shamanism or Christianity, but I think my spirituality lies somewhere in between. But the priests that I referred to are the missionaries being the tools of the colonial movements. The monster is something I deal with internally all the time, so sometimes I am the monster or sometimes I’m battling the monster. And that’s why I’m also fascinated by these monsters—Christian, shaman, and the grotesques in Roman frescoes and in the Uffizi ceilings. It also metaphorically represents greed, political greed, the greed of capitalism. Each of those words in the title have multiple meanings, and my relationship to them is that they all represent me as well. And I’m battling the monster every day. [Laughs]