Minjun Shin
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2025
20 oil on canvas, table made of plywood and timber, artificial flowers, glass bottles
painting 27.3x19.3cm (20), table 178 × 178 × 110cm, 2025
This question runs from my first solo exhibition in 2024, Earth Cape: To Meet You, and its work Korean Dinner Party, to my recent work Altar For Remembering Today. Last year’s piece directly borrowed Judy Chicago’s landmark feminist work The Dinner Party.
While Chicago’s work reclaims forgotten women of history, presenting them one by one in grandeur and desire for feminist social change, Korean Dinner Party (2024) juxtaposed the names and images of those in Korea who ended their lives through suicide or accident, inscribed across Byeongpung(folding screen which is korean traditional ornament for funeral) . Beginning with those who devoted themselves to opening a new world and ending with those who collapsed in disillusionment with the world, the work functioned as an archival structure that revealed cultural shifts around death.
Created in 2025, Altar for Remembering Today builds on the elements of Korean funerary tradition: a three-tiered circular altar, artificial chrysanthemums, and twenty paintings. On these paintings are inscribed images of deaths tied to state violence and social disasters—deaths collectively borne by Korean society. Here, the borrowing of images becomes more direct and forceful, transforming the altar into a shared site of remembrance.
Incident and images in Alter For Remembering Today
To confess: after the square in 2016, the square I encountered again in 2024 was a sorrowful experience. My former comrades, who once spoke of making the nation “a country worthy of being called a country,” were no longer by my side. When I met my friends, the conversations revolved around stocks and real estate. And yet, campaign after campaign, slogans of change—sparkling, radiant words crafted to capture hearts—were endlessly reproduced. I no longer believe much in promises of change made by those in power.
Newspaper Articles and Images Referenced
- Osong Flood Disaster
- Yongsan Disaster
- Aricell Disaster
- Itaewon Crowd Crush Disaster
- Sewol Ferry Disaster
- Muan Airport Disaster
- Humidifier Disinfectant Tragedy
- Samsung Semiconductor Worker Industrial Disease Cases
- Yong-gyun Kim
- “Kim” of Guui Station
- Yukwudang
- Joo-hyung Yoon
- Han-bit Lee
- Teacher of Seoi Elementary School
- Ssangyong Motor Struggle
- Gangnam Station Murder Case
- SPC Industrial Accident
- Seoul Women’s University “Everytime” Student Suicide Case
- Vietnamese Migrant Worker Heatstroke Death
- Necklace of Remembrance Ribbons