The next artist we undress here at the Parfois Blog is Jean Shin. Jean was born in Seoul, South Korea. She lives and works in New York City. I think its a bit strange that I don’t see her work appear in other websites and blogs. If you look at her work, you notice there is a message in it. Her installations are mostly build with all kind of leftovers. With which she creates her own world. She does this not only with installations, but also with photography, video, prints and sculptures. Read on for Jean Shin’s full story.
Biography:
Jean Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform castoff materials into
elegant expressions of identity and community.  Working in a variety of mediums, she collects vast accumulations of singular objects—prescription pill bottles, sports trophies, sweaters—which she alters into conceptually rich sculptures, videos and site-specific installations.  Distinguished by her meticulous, labor intensive process of amassing her materials from various communities, her arresting installations reflect the individuals’ personal lives as well as collective issues that we face as a society.
Her work has been widely exhibited in major national and international museums, including solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC (2009), the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia (2006), and Projects at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2004).
Other venues have been the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Asia Society and Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Frederieke Taylor Gallery in New York City.  Site-specific permanent installations have been commissioned by the US General Services Administration Art in Architecture Award, New York City’s Percent for the Arts and MTA Art for Transit.  She has received numerous awards, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures (2008) and Sculpture (2003), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Art Award.  Her works have been featured in several publications, including Frieze Art, Flash Art, Tema Celeste, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Artnews, and The New York Times.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Shin attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999 and received a BFA and MS from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.  She lives and works in New York City.
Artist Statement:
My work speaks of the optimism inherent in giving new form to life’s leftovers. In my sculptures and large-scale installations, I seek to recall an object’s past, as well as suggest its greater connection to our collective memories, desires and failures.
My inventory of everyday materials includes broken umbrellas, donated clothing, losing lottery tickets, emptied wine bottles and old computer keycaps. These humble remnants, often forgotten and no longer “useful”, retain the traces of their former lives. After accumulating and deconstructing hundreds—sometimes even thousands—of these cast-offs, I generate a seemingly homogenous construction that in turn emphasizes the individuality and variety among apparently indistinct objects. As the uniformity of the collection falls away, the accumulation of ephemera reveals new meanings and associations.
Frequently, I solicit donations from participants within a specific community. The donated items act as surrogates for the original owners by referencing the body both physically and metaphorically. Some works represent the body more abstractly while speaking to the ideas of sense, perception, and behavior. As a result, my installations become, in effect, group portraits or maps of contemporary society.
The focus shifts constantly in my installations between individual and group identity, the single unit and the larger whole, the intimate and the excessive. My elaborate work-process mirrors these dualities, as objects of mass production and consumerism are transformed through intense handmade labor.
Much of my work is site-specific, and thus establishes a dialogue with architecture and the outside environment. By reinserting these constructions to the public realm, I invite viewers to bring their own histories to the work. Through these interactions, each installation creates its own imaginary community and speaks to our shared experiences.
Why Jean Shin?
One of the Parfois members, Jonas Blondeel, came across Shin a wile ago, his work is mostly made out of recyceld materials. With some old pallets he made the “Parfois Chair“, with leftovers from a stone mill he made a cupboard… So Eco-design is something we are familiar with. I think Shin takes recycling to an other level. There are plenty of artists building things out of trash, but unlike them Shin gives you a story, and most of the time its not a fairytale. Take her installation “Chemical Balance” (one of my favorites) for example, it is commonly know that people take too much medicine. You go to the doctor with a little cold, he pops you full of pills. Walking by an installation that is based on hunderds of empty prescription bottles makes you think about it. It forces you too see the drug problem in our society. An other example is the installation “Change City”, a city build out of losing lottery tickets with a total value of $32,404. So for me it is not really the beauty of the complete picture, the story behind her installations is something of a much bigger value.
Work:
Jean Shin is a productive artist, it is impossible to show every installation she made here at Parfois. So i’ve picked my personal favorites. All other work can be found at her website.
All the information about the installations and other work come form Jean Shin’s website.
Chance City, 2001-09
$32,404 worth of discarded “Scratch & Win” losing lottery tickets (no adhesive)
Approximately 7 ft h x 21 ft w x 10 ft d
Installation at Smithsonian American Art
Museum, 2009 
$24,496 worth of discarded “Scratch & Win” losing lottery tickets (no adhesive)
Approximately 8 ft h x 8 ft w x 6 ft d
Installation at Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2004
$17,119 worth of discarded “Scratch & Win” losing lottery tickets (no adhesive)
Installation at Caren Golden Gallery, New York, 2002
Chance City is made up of thousands of discarded scratch-and-win lottery tickets that have been arranged into an urban complex, constructed as a house of cards. Embodying the failed hopes of ordinary people, the worthless lottery tickets become building blocks for monumental, yet temporary structures. While no glue was used to make these towering and pre
cariously-balanced edifices, they are sturdier than they look. The structures, literally held up by gravity and friction,
are symbols of the American Dream representing how labor, money and resilience defy the odds of a fragile
existence.
Chemical Balance, 2005-09
Chemical Balance III, 2009  Prescription bottles, mirror and epoxy, fluorescent lights
5 units, from 18 to 40 inches in diameter
Overall dimensions variable
Installation at Smithsonian American
Art Museum, Washington, D.C. 
Chemical Balance II, 2005
Prescription bottles, mirror and epoxy 7 units, from 18 to 38 inches in diameter Commissioned by University Art Museum, Albany, NY  To create this work, thousands of empty prescription pill bottles were collected from nursing homes, pharmacies and  individuals’ medicine cabinets. Like stalactites and stalagmites, the constructions hang down from above and grow upwards from the floor below.Chemical Balance speaks to our culture’s over-consumption of prescription drugs and our bodies’ dependency on these medications. The piece acts like a group portrait, mapping our society’s chemical intake. The illuminated structures radiate with an intense orange glow, suggesting that issues of health reach far beyond the physical.
Key Promises, 2006
In collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia
Computer command key caps: enter, clear, space, backspace, pause/break, control, shift, alt/option, return, home, esc, end 46 linear feet Installation at Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York, 2007
By isolating and transforming ordinary computer command keys, the artist creates playful, concrete poetry. Removed from the keyboard and placed onto the wall, the command keys repeat such words as “control”, “pause”, “home”, “escape” and “end.” Viewers are invited to ponder the
various meanings and associations of these found words. The keycaps construct a path, while leading the viewer through the architecture of the gallery.
Armed, 2005-09
Cut fabric (military uniforms from US soldiers), thread and starch
14 ft h x 36 ft w x 6 ft d
Installation at Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., 2009 
13 ft h x 38 ft w x 6 ft d
Installation at PKM Gallery, Beijing, 2006
14 ft h x 24 ft w x 6 ft d
Installation at Roebling Hall, NY, 2005
This large-scale fabric mural is composed of military uniforms donated from American soldiers. The deconstructed uniforms bring together a community of soldiers and veterans that have served in various wars,
from WWII and Korea to Vietnam and Iraq. The different types of camouflage reflect the varied landscapes in which American troops historically have fought, such as the jungle and the desert. Pasted flat like wallpaper, the installation of camouflaged uniforms
questions the notion of the US military’s
visibility.
Alterations, 1999
Fabric (pants scraps) and wax
2 ft h x 12 ft w x 12 ft d
Collection of Peter Norton, Santa Monica
In Alterations, a colorful and dense cityscape is constructed of hundreds of cylindrical forms made from the leftover fabric of shortened pants and blue jeans. The standing heights of each wax-stiffened cuff represent the measurement of the body in absence. The installation comments on one’s failure to measure up to the fashion industry’s standard size. At the same time, the cast-off cuffs refer to a population—predominantly Asian immigrants—who make up a large portion of
the clothing industry’s workforce, including sweat-shop seamstresses, tailors and dry-cleaners.
Previously Undressed:
- Ron English
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