Jieun Shin: Paintings

The artist hosts an opening reception on Friday, April 9 during Northampton's Arts Night Out, 5pm-7pm. Regular gallery hours are 11am-4pm, Tuesday through Friday.

Jieun Shin’s work is a map of her experience as both an artist and as a Korean immigrant. Pieces of furniture, shadows of figures, and ghostly geometric shapes collide in weightless melee in her watercolors. IKEA shelving units and small groups of fish swim side by side while sofa-carrying silhouettes float their burdens through the dream-like space.

"I wanted to represent my psychological distance to my homeland by juxtaposing my culture with something from my immediate surroundings in North America,” Shin says. “I found dissonance among the IKEA furniture and ersatz antique furniture that I have brought from Korea. For me, IKEA has become a symbol of cultural dislocation."

Shin's paintings struggle with the loss of cultural identity, combining patterns from historic Korean textiles and embroidery with western images of mass-production. "I consider my work a surrogate portrait of a migrant. My intention is to explore my individual identity as an artist in relation to the complex (visual ) histories of different worlds."

Jieun Shin earned her M.F.A from Ewha Womans University in Seoul Korea and has displayed her work internationally and locally including exhibitions at the Catherine Schultz Gallery in Cambridge, MA and
Duckwon Gallery in Seoul, Korea.