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Title
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Jean Shin
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Description
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Jean Shin was born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States at the age six, and grew up in Maryland. She moved to New York to pursue studies in art. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and earned her BFA and MS from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York (Shin, n.d.). Jean Shin’s works explore cultural identity and community through unique, innovative installations that transform discarded objects into art to convey ideas about human consumption. In Reconstructed Remnants, Shin explains, “I am attracted to certain found materials…because they embody a certain history of dysfunction, rejection, and abandonment” (Shin 2004, 11). This perspective that Shin has drives her to salvage these everyday items and create a visual narrative of urban life.
One of Jean’s notable works, Chance City (2001-2009), is a fragile cityscape that was built with over 200,000 discarded lottery tickets, and this symbolizes the fleeting nature of hope that is connected to gambling (Asia Art Archive 2010). With the installed work being stacked without any extra support than the cards themselves, it presents the lost dreams and desperation of people playing these lottery tickets for a chance to win big, and perhaps the notion that fortunes can rise, but more likely fall in an instant. The collected cards are constructed as landscapes that resemble a vast metropolis where people of the lower class reside. It presents how people who play these tickets are confined in a building full of losing tickets as they continue to be stuck in their economic status (Shin 2004, 21). Shin describes the work as “an anonymous monument of lost hopes and dreams”, further highlighting the collective despair that is embedded within the discarded tickets (Shin 2004, 21).
Overall, Jean Shin’s works utilizes the everyday lost materials that people throw away or discard in their everyday lives, and she constructs installations that present stories related to those materials that tackle different social challenges and experiences.
Bibliography:
Asia Art Archive. 2010. “Interview with Jean Shin.” Accessed April 20, 2025. https://aaa.org.hk/en/like-a-fever/like-a-fever/interview-with-jean-shin.
Shin, Jean. n.d. “Biography.” Accessed April 20, 2025. https://www.jeanshin.com/biography.
Shin, Jean. 2004. Jean Shin: Reconstructed Remnants. New York: Plein Air Corp.
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Alternative Title
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Chance City (2001-2009)
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Source
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Artist Photo: Praise Shadows Art Gallery. “Jean Shin.” Accessed April 22, 2025. https://www.praiseshadows.com/artists/63-jean-shin/.
Artwork Image: Jean Shin. “Chance City.” Accessed April 22, 2025. https://www.jeanshin.com/chance-city.
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Name
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Miguel Garduno
