Kyungmi Shin at Various Small Fires

Kyungmi Shin, Soaring Volture, Noble Eagle, Moaning Dove (2021). Acrylic on archival pigment print, UV laminate; diptych, 88 x 62 inches each. Image courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles/Seoul.

Kyungmi Shin’s father was a Christian minister in South Korea before the family immigrated to the United States—the religion was a colonial import to Korea in the late 1800s, replacing shamanism and Confucianism, which quickly became othered with the introduction of the Westernized religious practices. Shin’s exhibition, citizen, not barbarian, at Various Small Fires, takes this inherent contradiction as its starting place and weaves in other personal stories that create transportive poly-narratives, redirecting the white gaze and offering alternative ways of seeing.

The exhibition takes its title from Édouard Glissant’s book Poetics of Relation (1990) and reads as a reference to the way that shared knowledge complicates identity. In her digital photo collage works, Shin carefully superimposes one image onto the next, creating a dynamic and robust language that allows multiple narratives to coexist—tigers, which symbolize conquering fear in Korean culture, share space with Western art historical references. Shin places subjects of diaspora and members of her family at the forefront of each image, suggesting an antithesis to the dominant white narrative of a migrant barbarian who must assimilate in order to survive and whose stories are erased from collective and personal histories as a result of colonialism.

While Shin’s photo-collage paintings and prints line the walls, a Chinese curio structure, adorned with a myriad of sculptural objects and relics, greets viewers as soon as they enter the main gallery. The curio includes objects that point to Eurasian trade: ceramic opium poppies sit alongside ceramic human limbs with rococo embellishment and porcelain busts of the artist and her father, both bathed in celadons. The ceramic bust of Shin’s father, which captures him at an age right before his death, stares directly across the gallery space at the diptych Soaring Vulture, Noble Eagle, Moaning Dove (2021), an acrylic painting over a digital photo collage, which depicts the artist as a child. The sightline between these two works creates a powerful tension between their subjects: the father, a Christian minister, and the daughter, who is reconciling her own cultural identity and its entanglement with colonial influences. Her image is split across two frames, beneath illustrations of a Portuguese carriage along with Chaekgeori paintings and shaman ritualistic imagery. By juxtaposing these motifs within the same frame, Shin renders them both visible, when in reality one—Christianity—has all but erased and demonized the other, shamanism. In this artwork, they are simultaneously present and active in this young subject’s life. The title, as well as the position of the diptych in relation to the curio, suggests future paths for the young Shin.

In Carry Dreams Over the Mountains (2021), Modigliani’s Reclining Nude (1917) looms large behind a photograph of Shin’s mother, who stands powerfully at the center of the frame. By placing the image of her mother in quotidian laborer’s clothing in the forefront and subjecting Modigliani’s white woman to the background, Shin suggests an alternative lens for which to look at the body of marginalized women who are seen as secondary subjects in the Western art canon. Fine white outlines gracefully follow the edges of her mother’s image, while gently painted blue swallows, offerings of food (many of which take the form of the shape of twin breasts), and a yellow outline of a tiger surround her. While her mother’s image is blurred between the lines and melds into the background, the white outlines cement her in the foreground of the image, standing defiant in the face of erasure.

As an immigrant myself, I meditate on each layer and revelation of these photo-collages. What Shin offers is a magnifying glass that highlights cracks in the dominant white lens while simultaneously elevating marginalized immigrant stories—I have known Shin for seven years, and seen the depth with which her family archive has contributed to each artwork on view. She is intentionally drawing from her own contradictory sociocultural influences, revealing the immigrant experience as anything but binary and imagining new versions of herself. Shin closely investigates how the past shapes the present—seeing the other as citizen, not barbarian.

Kyungmi Shin: citizen, not barbarian runs from November 20, 2021–January 8, 2022 at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (812 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90038).

Kyungmi Shin, citizen, not barbarian (installation view) (2021). Image courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles/Seoul.

Kyungmi Shin, Head in the Tiger’s Mouth (detail) (2021). Acrylic on archival pigment print, UV laminate, 55 x 45.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles/Seoul.

Kyungmi Shin, Carry Dreams Over the Mountains (2021). Acrylic on archival pigment print, UV laminate, 41 x 41 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles/Seoul.

Kyungmi Shin, Chinoiserie Hand #1 (2020). High fire ceramic, cobalt blue, and clear glaze, 4 x 13.5 x 4 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles/Seoul.

Silvi Naçi is an artist and writer working between Albania and Los Angeles. Their interest lies in the subtle and violent ways that decolonization and migration affect and reshape people, language, gender identity, and social and cultural dynamics.

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