Gyun Hur & Jean Shin continue their conversation, speaking about their relationships to their studio practices, to labor-intensive work, and to ritual. The following is an edited transcription from a longer conversation between Gyun Hur and Jean Shin on August 24, 2021 (co-edited by Gyun Hur, Danny Gurung, and Jean Shin). Read part 1 and part 2 of their conversation on our website.

Photo by Joseph Hu for the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Gyun Hur (GH): I’m curious what occurs in your studio as far as your interior while shifting through so many of these materials through your hands. I know work is work. That’s a big part of studio practice in general, but is there something that goes on inside of you?

Jean Shin (JS): My relationship with the studio has evolved. It’s a space where I go that often requires creating some order out of this chaos. This process becomes an important ritual. Before I make art, I sort the inventory of stuff that I have dragged from one place to another and end up in my studio. I’m the holder of other people’s donated objects until I can find a project for these castoffs to activate. There’s a lot of moving things around in the studio, cleaning too.  Then at some point, something from the peripheral of my eye grabs my attention. It takes hold of me like a strange calling to work. I start experimenting and creating a mess again.  

Material exploration is a way for me to process thoughts. Later, I can articulate that feeling, connecting ideas to forms that are more tangible, physical, and visible. This radical transformation is an essential part of my process. What can I do with these discards? What does it want to become next? The studio is constantly changing. When one project finishes, there is more chaos before the piece moves into a new site. Then the whole cleaning up process starts over again.  I assess and hold into these leftovers because they contain residual conversations to explore and reactivate later.

GH: Your persistence to see the potentiality in all of these objects is incredible because it takes a particular level of commitment. Maybe it starts with small gestures of organization but then also it’s that deep level of choosing to look further and letting those materials speak to you. I know that the process of both external organization and then looking in, the internal work, is all very laborious, you know?

JS: The internal work is what drives me.  What are the resources that I already have? What do I take for granted? What do I have access to? It may be very modest, but I start there. I maximize that and see where it takes me.

Some people think, “One of these days, if x,y,z happens, I’m going to do something in the future.” But for me, I start now at home. With my hands, making that initial investment of my own time and labor, I figure out what is possible. When I have not shown that it is possible first, why should others believe in your “dream”? Instead of fantasy, I start by doing and then set a plan in motion. I commit to myself before I approach an external organization for support.  Besides, I have plenty of materials to work with. I never throw anything out (laughs). That can be a problem in some ways, but the problem could be the solution too. When partners see what I’ve produced with the limited means that I have, there’s an excitement about the greater possibilities when we work together to help amplify the work.

Huddled Masses, 2020, in exhibition Jean Shin: Pause at Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA

GH: What’s your relationship to labor? We're talking about the labor of you being an artist and manifesting this very will of artists but I’m curious how you define it or how it defines you.

JS: You’re right that there’s always been a labor-intensive, obsessive, repetitive...

GH: And people describe, and you describe your work in that way but I feel like there’s room to dig deeper. What does it mean to be labor intensive, right? It’s something that I’ve been thinking about, trying to find language around the ‘why’?

JS: I do think it honors our histories. We can talk about the feminist movement and women’s work. Women have historically gone into social service--becoming teachers, nurses, doing child-raising and cooking. It’s care work and it’s often underpaid. If not free, the labor is often exploited, often unacknowledged.  While it happens on the professional level, it continues at home. Women often bear the brunt of house work, cleaning, cooking and raising children.  I position myself by co opting this labor and unapologetically using it as an artistic action.

As you know, Asian American history has labor embedded in it in the global trade around capitalism. Things made from Asia and Asian labor are cheap. Perceived as replaceable and worthless. Done in poor factory conditions. I want to counteract this by making art that is handmade. Instead of making the new, for capitalism and profitability, I want to be a bit counterproductive, slow, and using old things. Making something out of one’s hand is not the most effective and efficient way-- that’s why I want to celebrate it. Oftentimes people call it “the labor of love.” Why would you repair something when you can just buy another new one for less cost. It questions the worth of something vs the value we instill in it.

When I’m in the studio doing this labor intensive work, it’s very meditative. I think that kind of repetition offers something beyond labor--to center myself. Most people don’t talk about that.  What are people thinking about while they’re doing this work? How does this time devoted to labor and thinking feed their soul? I don't actually do meditation, that’s my aspiration, maybe in my next decade. (laughs).

GH: No, tomorrow! (laughs)

JS: I can spend hours doing it, lost in my own thoughts. It really feeds me, slowing down my thought process, emptying it out in a kind of meditation space. It is labor with purpose, with intentionality.

Fresh picked garlic from the garden, Photo: Jean Shin

GH: I was writing recently just about my relationship between my own practice with labor and  my family. Labor has so many lineages that as women, as Asian American immigrants, we just inherently understand what that means and how we embody that.

JS: Recently, I’ve been thinking about my work’s relationship to ritual. Again, this symbolic way of expressing things through labor and in the repetition of it becomes ceremonial. I think that’s very true to your work in reenactments.

GH: I don’t know any other way to express the interior landscape. The ritual gives a sort of framework. Our knowledge in the visual language and art history does the same. Formalism helps frame the way in which I channel some of the chaos that you mentioned, that we feel. There’s a need for a system to shift through --- I set those parameters so that I can feel contained and held.

JS: Right, and we’re talking about invisible labor.  When you talk about enacting ritual, it makes it visible…

GH: True, yes you’re right!

JS: That’s incredibly powerful because rituals create meaning by doing it; whereas the other labor is invisible and therefore lost in global capitalism. I think that’s a really incredible space to work out of, making visible that labor and ritualizing it.

Bees enjoying the lavender, Photo: Jean Shin

GH: I want to wrap up the interview by asking two questions. What’s been on your mind a lot recently? And the second question is what does love look like for you (laughs) outside of your work?

JS: (laughs) What’s been on my mind, which you noted recently in a lot of the work, has been a conversation around ecology. I’m again owning this space around what sustainability looks like and how we live with the world in the age of the anthropocene and climate crisis. Looking at nature and our habitats, there’s a need for biodiversity if we are going to survive and thrive. How can my practice create a kind of regenerative space and do restorative work using consumer waste? Addressing environmental justice head on. I’ve been creating work by repurposing the endless discards that surround us, but now I want to push further and deeper into making works more restorative. Maybe that means my work really has to change and shift too. I continue to question the consequences of our consumer desire.

I’m about to turn 50 and I’m proud to have lived half a century. I think about my own legacy as an artist and the legacies of these works.  This intergenerational dialogue that you and I are having is great.  How do we activate more of that?  I’m thinking about all of this while also gardening! How can I be a better gardener? And maybe it addresses your last question, what does love look like in life? To me, love is restorative. Love gives and offers. It’s part of something greater than oneself. Even if it feels overwhelming, knowing that we are destroying the earth and there’s so much uncertainty ahead of us, I feel reassured by the relationships that I’m honoring and wanting to be accountable for my actions.

GH: Wow, thank you Jean and happy early birthday!

JS: Thank you, perfect timing for me…

Summer harvest from my veggie garden, Photo: Jean Shin

Gyun Hur is an interdisciplinary artist and an educator whose experience as an immigrant daughter deeply fuels her practice. Gyun recently completed Stove Works Residency, Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship, and Danspace Project Writer-in-Residency. She is the inaugural recipient of The Hudgens Prize. Her works have been featured in Hyperallergic, The Cut, Art In America, Art Paper, Sculpture, Art Asia Pacific, Public Art Magazine Korea, and more. Her interest in art making in public space led her to various artist presentations at the TEDxCentennial Women, Living Walls: The City Speaks, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, The New School, and many others. Gyun has contributed as an artist-writer in fLoromancy, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Forgetory.

Born in South Korea, she moved to Georgia at the age of 13. She currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Parsons School of Design.

gyunhur.com @gyunhurstudio

Jean Shin is an artist recognized for her site-specific installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community engagement. Her work is distinguished by her labor-intensive process and immersive environments that capture collective issues that we face as a society. Her work has been widely exhibited in major national and international museums, including in solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona and Crow Collection in Dallas.