Minjun Shin

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Altar for Jizo and Miroku

2024/2026
3-Channel video installation
Dimension Variable

Installation View, Hackney gallery, London, UK

Installation View, Tshusima Museum, Tshusima, Japan

Altar for Jizo and Miroku is an installation that reflects on the notion of the “end” and what comes after by juxtaposing two bodhisattvas from Korean and Japanese Buddhist traditions: Jizo and Miroku. Both figures are closely connected to the lives of ordinary people, yet they respond to time in fundamentally different ways. Miroku symbolizes the possibility of a new salvation and a restart that arrives after the end of the world, while Jizo is understood as a figure who remains within endlessly prolonged worldly suffering, practicing care without resolution.

The artist draws a metaphorical correspondence between these two figures and the suicide of his younger brother, as well as his own condition as the one left behind. Jizo statues, commonly found in Japan, are figures who care for beings condemned to suffering even after death, embodying the artist’s personal wish that his brother may have reached a place of peace. In contrast, the scattered statues of Miroku found across Korea function as symbols of a skeptical yet un-abandoned hope—that even in a world that feels as if everything has already ended, it might still be possible for the world to begin again. Korea and Japan also serve as overlapping sites of the brothers’ formative memories, and as spaces the artist has repeatedly traversed in the aftermath of loss.