Jeena Shin
Movement Image Time

Two Rooms is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent work, which includes a series of 70 black and white digital-photograms and 4 new paintings by Jeena Shin. Shin has established a generative system by combining mathematical instructions in a formal sequence with ever-changing variations. This apparently encrypted language is in fact, very simple to decipher. The enquiry into seriality and variation temporally connects to the negative forms from the paintings in Shin’s 2014 exhibition Motus at Two Rooms whereby she carefully controlled the layering process, arriving at paintings that give the illusion of movement or chromatic vibration.

The repeated negative forms are overlaid in fourteen variations and three tones of black and white, yet unlimited possibilities are opened in their recombination. The logic of the system’s own working is endlessly extended, without repetition. Shin builds a creative structure for art making as a dynamic system where the paintings and photograms accumulate and collapse into themselves. The visual code emerges through a continuous process of accumulation, fragmentation, formation and regeneration. This same system has recently appeared in the form of a massive wall painting at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth as part of the current exhibition Surface Affects.

The visual system can be regarded as an archive, a documentation of a process of play. The works challenge our sense-perception of figure and ground through rhythms, pulses and sudden after images. We are rewarded by durational viewing; forms dissolve into visual snow, deconstructing and reconstructing our spatio-temporal experience. The treatment of formal and spatial relations as undifferentiated, activates and undoes our optical experience.

Shin was born in Seoul, Korea and graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1997. She received a Masters of Fine Arts from RMIT Melbourne in 2000. Since 2007, Shin has completed a number of major site-specific projects where she has painted directly on the walls of public galleries. Projects have included Wellington City Gallery, the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, the entrance stairwell at Artspace, Auckland, and her largest work, a 23 metre long commission at Dunedin Public Art Gallery. In 2016 she presented a large all encompassing painting installation titled Movement at the Dowse Art Museum in collaboration with Andrew Barber. She has a significant public art project of architectural site-specific murals at the Herald Theatre Foyer, at the Aotea Centre. Wystan Curnow invited her to mount a year – long installation, a complex suite of interconnected wall paintings at Jar in 2016/2017. Shin was selected for the important painting exhibition, Necessary Distraction, curated by Natasha Conland, at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki in 2015. She was also was invited to participate in the inaugural exhibition, Soft Architecture, curated by Balamohan Shingade to launch the Malcolm Smith Gallery in 2016. Shin’s next major painting installation project will be for Te Papa in February 2018.