Jean Shin
“By reinserting used, familiar materials back into the public realm, I invite a large, diverse audience to bring their own histories to the work.“ - Jean Shin
Jean Shin is one of four artists who have participated in City as Living Laboratory’s Chinatown Project to engage residents in the sustainability issues that affect them every day. She creates sculptures, videos, and often monumental, site-specific installations from hundreds, even thousands of discarded objects donated by community members – no object is without merit or history, and no site without context. Shin’s work weaves a narrative balanced between the individual and the community.
For CALL Chinatown, Shin and anthropologist Robin Nagle led a 2016 CALL Walk that focused on patterns of consumption, the recycling work done by canners, and Chinatown’s hidden infrastructures of waste streams and labor. In 2017, she led “Taking Root,” a workshop in which participants created and distributed dynamic sculptures that function as stackable, vertical gardens for traditional Chinese medicinal plants.
Shin’s works have been commissioned by government agencies including the MTA, The City of Seattle, U.S. General Services Administration, and major museums including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
TAKING ROOT WITH JEAN SHIN 2016
In this workshop, artist Jean Shin helped participants create dynamic sculptures that also function as stackable, vertical gardens for distribution of Chinese Medicinal plants. Creating new value out of leftover plastic waste, the project reclaims these unwanted containers and turns them into small habitats for living plants ready for redistribution and growth in the community. The green mobile sculpture takes inspiration from the lush mountains of China depicted in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Workshop participants learned how to transform plastic bottles into self-watering planters to house locally sourced mugwort.
This workshop is part of Take Root, part of CALL // CHINATOWN, a larger project by Jean Shin to transform the congested urban setting of Chinatown into a place of healing and wellness. The exchange of living medicinal plants and its healing properties tap into the informal systems already in place based on health and resilience, while also being able to share this knowledge of Chinese Medicinal plants with the community at large.
BROADWAY: 1000 STEPS/CHINATOWN - FALL 2016
Artist Jean Shin and ecologist Robin Nagle’s CALL/WALKS highlighted the often invisible immigrant population, systems and economies that are part of the ecology of Chinatown. Shin and Nagle focused on recycling work done by canners, patterns of consumption, and hidden infrastructures of waste stream and labor. The walk began at Chatham Square. The walk spoke with a shop owner who articulated his experience working in the canning redemption business. While the Chinese canners provide invaluable service to the city and the public by picking through the garbage cans in order to properly redeem and recycle these products, they face discrimination. After, they walked to the City’s Department of Sanitation building, where Nagle spoke about her research into waste and in particular the history, laws, and conditions that led to the current reality of can redemption and the problems it imposes in Chinatown where is lack of official infrastructure of can redemption.
This walk was a part of CALL/WALKS, an ongoing series of artist and scientist led public walks diving deep into urgent, local environmental concerns and innovative ideas to overcome them. This particular walk connects to CALL’s larger initiative in the Broadway: 1000 Steps
OTHER WORKS
Other CALL CHINATOWN Artists
