Kyung-hee Shin - Sleeping City

Kyung-hee Shin represents her inner world and childhood's memories in her work by using a variety of symbolic visual images. Her present artworks "Sleeping City", which are composed of wood-panels and quilts, contain not only a deeper sense of color but also more expanded scale than her former works. They have various things to see and richer stories to read. She is describing her day-to-day occurrences and personal memories as if she is writing a picture diary with symbolical fragmentary images, while they demonstrate the sense of weight and density based on her printing experiences. Both abstract and figurative images complete the role and function as the entire image of her whole work, and at the same time each image guarantees its individual independence.

Shin's works, which demonstrate a huge scale as a collection of small panels, strongly emanate the charm of labor-oriented craftsmanship. In her work, complex manual contact is made by touching, hammering, stitching, cutting, rubbing, knitting, sewing and painting. And she is even making papers in her personal way. Thus, with looking over each image, viewers would be impressed by reading her life-time history and her perspiration with hard-labor until the works get done.

The title "Sleeping City" shows a depth of her thoughts of "city". In other words, we can see her self-reflecting attitude toward the double-faced city which produces all kinds of visual images. Human's civilization has founded with the city, and as the civilization has stood in enormous visual images, which have been involved in the process of formation, her "Sleeping city" is also past-oriented and future-oriented. Each image is a kind of city's symbolic metaphor which shows dreams of the past and visions of the future at the same time. Throughout those fragmentary images of many objects, Shin gives viewers an opportunity to think about another side of confirmation and denial, hope and despair, destruction and revival, etc.