Mi Jung Shin

After graduating in Eastern painting in Korea, Mi Jung Shin received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art from the National School of Art in Dijon (ENSA Dijon). Upon her return to Korea, she has lived in a different Korean city each year in order to develop projects that capture the forgotten memories of each region’s diaspora.

Mi Jung Shin works with an interest in the demolished sense of place, where only traces of individuals excluded from the grand narrative and their lives remain. She primarily creates videos based on oral histories and historical materials collected through fieldwork, and experiments with the construction of micro-narratives within the tension that emerges at the boundary between images and records. In particular, she records the lives of individuals who have been forcibly forgotten or erased from the modern Korean history; she also experiments with the potential of video works with open-ended interpretations.

Shin began contemplating placeness from the trace of workers she accidently discovered while collecting evidence from a theft incident that occurred during her first solo exhibition in an abandoned factory in 2014. What she found were discarded photographs and letters detailing lives disrupted by the invisible power of capital. Later, as she moved from region to region in order to sustain herself as an artist, Shin began to uncover the buried past of people who, like her, had been unable to settle down.

A critical perspective and attitude towards the familiar and the comfortable, efforts to bring forgotten things back above the surface, an interest in others, and the new understanding and powerful emotions that come from piecing together the forgotten links of history have helped me to realize that archiving is not simply a matter of recording something, but a form of “artistic act” that leads the viewer and author alike to new horizons. Through observation, investigation, and an artistic process of recording and summarizing in images, I have been involved in an ongoing reflection on what the artistic (l’artistique) truly is, through questions of “art and historicity,” “personal recollections and state records,” and “the record as image and its artistic potential”.

Mi Jung Shin participated in notable solo exhibitions such as Three Voices, A World Unveiled (POMA, Pohang, 2024), CityXIslandXArchive (SeMA Bunker, Seoul, 2021) and numerous group exhibitions such as the Diaspora film festival (Incheon, 2024), The 23rd Songeun Art Award (Seoul, 2023),  WalgadaKan Good, Ssalon (PSLA, USA, 2024), Signaling Perimeters (Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2021) and  Cities of Korea (Ottawa Korean Film Festival, 2021).