Minjun Shin



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Myeonjung - A Time That Must Move into the Future

2025
PVC, curtain rings, wooden support, urethane foam, printed fabric, artificial flowers
Dimension variable










The “Myeongjeong” is a red flag inscribed with the name and identity of the deceased—a public declaration of one’s death. At my younger brother’s funeral, the image that stayed with me most vividly was the final day, when the coffin, draped in that red flag, was carried out. It was the moment I realized I truly had to let him go.

The red flag, however, is also a historic emblem of revolution. I once regretted my life as an activist and feared the path of an artist, but after my brother’s death, I began to define both as attitudes toward life itself. Since then, I have chosen to live at their intersection. The “Myeongjeong” thus evokes both grief for my brother and, perhaps because of that grief, a renewed longing for historical time—a utopian impulse toward the future.

In the suspended rhythm where time feels stalled for the individual and history feels halted for society, I wanted, in a sense of prayer, to summon that intense image back into the present.


Note
Historical time — in Marxist thought, the time of the future — is a profoundly special kind of time. It speaks of possibility, yet not of the abstract, hollow kind that becomes so vague it loses its force, nor of the dystopian narratives that reappropriate the tragedies and violence already present in our world today under the guise of the “future.” (How many works and exhibitions have we seen conceived under such names?) In Marxism, the “future” refers instead to the utopian ideal — the moment of emancipation.

Even if Marxism today appears as a pale ghost of itself, the impulse toward utopia continues to re-emerge in different forms. This utopia is not invalidated by the rise and fall of historical socialist states; it is a world that has not yet come — and perhaps may never come. Yet it is precisely through this utopian impulse that we gain the strength to critique the present and to move forward within it.