INFO
| Name | Jeena Shin (she/her) |
| Born | 1973 |
| Country of Birth | South Korea |
| Place of Residence | Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland |
| Ethnicities | Korean |
| Dealer Gallery | Two Rooms |
| Artform | Visual arts |
| Decades Active | 2000s, 2010s, 2020s |
ABOUT
Jeena Shin is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau, known for her wall-based paintings of monochromatic geometric forms. Often working in a site-responsive way, Shin has been commissioned by major public institutions across Aotearoa to create large-scale, immersive works that often span multiple walls, and attest to her interest and acuity in the three-dimensional possibilities of painting.
Her precise, yet tumbling and layered, geometric forms have a dramatic sense of movement with the repetition of a simple shape generating a sense of endless possibilities. Since 2004, her working process has been guided by what she has termed a ‘fold model’ — a folded A4 sheet of paper used to create a rule-based, yet intuitive, system in response to aspects of the site or space in which she is working.
Motus (2013), a mural for Auckland’s Herald Theatre, spanned 50 metres of interrupted wall space, with paper-like flying triangular forms wrapping around and weaving between doorways, the bar and ticket counter. The sense of motion created by high-contrast, windswept shapes echoes the movement of people through the transitional foyer space.
Photographing or capturing either the entirety or subtlety of Shin’s work is not possible with the experience of scale and delicate tonal shifts dependent on both the viewer's movements and shifts of lighting conditions in a space. Thus, Shin has expressed the importance of drawing attention to the act of seeing, rather than to the work itself.
In a series of smaller scale acrylic on canvas paintings from her 2022 solo exhibition Time Delay at Two Rooms Gallery, the building up and breaking down of patterns, or time, is rendered in layered, lighter shades, continuing with the ‘fold model’ as starting point. While painterly traces of the artist’s hand are seemingly absent from such exacting geometric abstractions, Shin’s work is wholly crafted by hand using hand-cut templates. "Everyone thinks that I have got some kind of computer program that can write these patterns”.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Shin moved to Ōtautahi, Aotearoa with her family as a teenager. She studied at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland, graduating in 1997 and completed a Master's of Fine Arts at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2000.
Her work has been commissioned by Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland Live, Adam Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington. She was the recipient of the Artspace Residency Korea (2011) and the C Art Trust Contemporary Art Award (2014).
LINKS
Key works / presentations
2022 — Time Delay, Two Rooms, Tāmaki Makaurau
2019 — Time slice, Two Rooms, Tāmaki Makaurau
2018 — Movement Image Time, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Pōneke
2017 — Movement Image Time, Two Rooms, Tāmaki Makaurau
2016 — Motus, JAR, Tāmaki Makaurau
2014 — Motus, Two Rooms, Tāmaki Makaurau
2013 — Motus, commissioned by The Edge, Herald Theatre, Aotea Centre, Tāmaki Makaurau,
2012 — Reflection Reflected, Two Rooms, commissioned by The Edge
2011 — Fractus, Big Wall Project, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Ōtepoti
2009 — Fractus, Two Rooms, Tāmaki Makaurau
2009 — ARTSPACE Stairwell Project (1973–) 2009–2011, Artspace, Tāmaki Makaurau
2009 — Te Tuhi Wall Project, Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, Tāmaki Makaurau
Key awards
2011 — Artspace Residency Korea, Changdong Art Studio in Korea, National Studio of Arts, National Museum of Contemporary Arts Korea
2014 — C Art Trust Award
