Curatorial

WooJin Shin: Part of the Whole

March 6-March 30

Picnic Wine & Provisions, Chicago

Part of the Whole is a solo exhibition of paintings by Chicago-based artist WooJin Shin.

The paintings in this show represent a small selection of Shin’s body of work, which undulates between detailed mark-making and cloudy abstraction. This selection of paintings is an ebb in that ongoing current. Shin works and reworks his paintings over time so that each one is made up of multiple layers. Marks are never erased, rather, the final painting is the result of multiple iterations. Shin’s paintings encourage sustained viewing; his intricate patterns, scribbles, and smudges draw viewers close, then expand and synthesize the whole.

Shin feels a kinship with artists from the Dansaekhwa movement, a period in 1970’s Korea in which painters valued repetition as a meditative process. In East Asian culture and philosophy, an individual is seen not as a separate entity, but as a part of their surroundings. Similarly, Shin considers his paintings not as discrete objects with defined subject matter, but extensions of himself. They are not images with subject matter, they are markers of time and documents of the artist’s experience. Shin calls them, “frames within the time sequence of my life.”

Shared_Studios: Chicago Portal

July 25-August 4, 2019

Navy Pier, Chicago

Along with fellow curators Madison Rose Young and Chloe Yu Nong Lin, I worked with the artist collective Shared_Studios to launch a Portal on Chicago’s Navy Pier as part of their #Tweetups global activation. Portals are immersive spaces in which participants from all over the world can connect and communicate. Curators are tasked with guiding meaningful conversation between participants and curating original artistic programming to take place within the Chicago Portal. 

The mission of Shared_Studios is to give people everywhere a chance to tell their own story; to explore the diversity of human experience; to connect people separated by distance and difference in encounters that are humanizing and real.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago MFA Show

April 27-May 15, 2019

Sullivan Galleries, Chicago

The 2019 SAIC MFA Show is the culminating public presentation of more than 120 MFA candidates’ new and ambitious work. Students work for more than six months with three guest curators and 12 graduate curatorial assistants to envision the exhibition, an approach that allows for dialogue, process, and collaborative decision-making among the curatorial teams and artists.

For this exhibition, I worked closely with the following artists to develop new work:

Monster/Beauty

Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection

July 20-August 17, 2018

In her book Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love, art historian Joanna Frueh defines “monster/beauty” as “an extremely articulated sensuous presence, image, or situation in which the aesthetics and the erotic are inseparable.” Monster/Beauty rejects traditional models of beauty which rely on control and punishment and contribute to what Frueh calls an “aesthetics of deprivation.” Instead, monster/beauty calls for embodiment that focuses not only on visual pleasure, but on all senses. Monster/Beauty explodes traditional notions of beauty and makes room for the artificial, the excessive, the silly, and the grotesque. The images in this exhibit progress from aesthetics of deprivation; to a monster/beauty that seduces; to a monster/beauty that antagonizes and repulses. This exhibition departs from Frueh’s notion of a “body of love”—a body that is sensuous, pleasurable, and interpersonal—and considers the political implications of ugliness. In her recent article “Becoming Ugly,” Madeleine Davis reflects on a lifetime of being “pretty” for men and how, in the age of Trump, becoming ugly is one of few weapons that women have to resist bodily terrorism. “I can’t deny my current impulse to become as ugly and unlikeable as I can, merely to serve as constant reminder of the ugliness inflicted upon us. We’ve been told time and time again that prettiness and likability will protect us from harm, that to be good women, we must play by these rules, but this is a lie. Nothing will protect us except for ourselves—and what’s more fortifying than a defensive exterior? There are days when all I want is to become a human road sign, a blinking hazard to any man misfortunate enough to cross my path: ‘I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR SIGHT. I WANT TO OFFEND YOUR EVERYTHING.’