Minjun Shin
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Solji Kim(Director of Double deck works)
Solo Exhibition Minjun Shin: Living Practice Preface(2025)
There are people holding hands, gathering in the center, and spinning in circles. Four bodies come together, disperse, sling bags across their shoulders, flick a leg straight up and bend it, dropping it to the ground again—each moving on their own, only to clasp hands once more.
Have you ever found yourself halted in a time where no step toward the future seemed possible?
Not long ago, they went on an outing to Wolmido in Incheon. Before that, they had prepared their performance in a rehearsal room in Hyehwa. Before that, they had taken part in group therapy and sat as interviewees. Before that, they had met in Yeongdo, Busan, to work together or take part in shaping youth policy. And before that, and before that…
Have you ever stood at the zero point of a scale that tips with the slightest shift?
“Today, my eyes aren’t swollen.” (Footnote 1) They gather—those whose families have left. They cry in the places they share. The death of a loved one is a profoundly sorrowful thing. Rolling across the rehearsal floor in their own shapes, they rehearse the movements of performance. Loss, hollow yet heavy, presses down upon their hearts. None of the four ask, Do we have to do this? No one hesitates. Each simply does what they had agreed to do together. And so they remain, together.
Have you ever spun endlessly on your own, caught between the past you cannot leave and the future you cannot yet approach?
The end of one person’s life marks the beginning of mourning for those who knew them. In the spring of 2020, Minjun Shin lost his younger sibling, Jae-eun. At the final moment of the funeral, when the Myeongjung(Footnote 2) was lifted, he finally realized the absence of his sibling. Myeongjung - A Time That Must Move into the Future marks the zero point of those left behind—trapped in a past they cannot return to and a future they must move toward though they cannot. How shall we walk forward from here?
To resist death, to resist being trapped in the present, Shin sought to fortify himself and, as an artist, to devise ways to move into the future. Practice of Living is “a rehearsal for life undertaken by individuals who have endured the traumatic event of a family member’s death, and at the same time a rehearsal for living differently, with other attitudes and ways, by approaching the meaning of that death and evoking it communally.” (Footnote 3)
At Shin’s invitation, four people—Minjun Shin, Yewon Choi, Yujin Lim, and Sewan Yoon—joined hands in self-help. Their stories unfold through the exhibition and performance. As “performers” and “practitioners” of this project, they widen the precarious zero point into the ground beneath them. The floor becomes the terrain of art, where gathering is possible. Private experiences and intimate stories, brought forward, become shareable. Art carries a function of recovery. Practice of Living explores the possibility of a mourning community. (Footnote 4) The one-to-one bond between oneself and a deceased family member, whether by natural death or suicide, becomes a small community when shared with others of similar experience. The records and collective acts of this small community extend outward as a rehearsal for living.
The departed are present in Practice of Living. They dwell within the performers/practitioners’ hearts, embodied at times in gestures or voices. They appear in works such as Facing Time, a video juxtaposing interviews with the bereaved against landscapes once seen by the deceased, and Jae-eun’s Story, a reflection on a life that can no longer be archived.
The deepest sorrow I sensed in Minjun—the death of his sibling by suicide—was not confined to the level of a private event. The force that drew it into the realm of art, with its power of healing, publicity, and imagination, came perhaps from the impossibility of sharing the sociality contained in Jae-eun’s death. It was neither a workplace accident nor a public disaster, yet it was undeniably social.
Indeed, human beings are social by nature. Every death, whether voluntary or not, is both profoundly personal and inherently social. Within the structured web of the Republic of Korea, we exist autonomously as individuals while also influencing and being influenced by others—through conformity or deviation alike. The fragments of interviews, counseling transcripts, and stories heard along the way of Practice of Living reveal the layers of society woven into personal lives: neglect, sales work, loans, credit debt, fraud, loneliness, breakups…
In Practice of Living, Shin illuminates the ties between individual life and death and the social structures that shape them. Through Altar for Remembering Today, a series of twenty paintings commemorating deaths and disasters we share in memory, he mourns collectively. In Words of Promise Do Not Reach, an installation layering the portraits of eighteen martyrs—one from each Korean president from Syngman Rhee to Yoon Suk Yeol —he juxtaposes our society’s sacrifices, deaths, and resistances against the backdrop of political slogans.
Why should we listen to the stories of the four practitioners in Practice of Living? With nine new works including performances, Shin’s attempt to enact and to embody change, to live individually and collectively, is an artistic endeavor to erase indifference. He insists on linking his family’s suicide, and his own suffering and grief, to society at large. (Footnote 5) Through diverse media, he reveals the connections between solitary, forgotten deaths and the fabric of our lives, seeking to awaken new bonds among those who encounter this exhibition.
To mourn together the parting of the dead and to listen attentively to the stories of the four performers/practitioners is an act of respect for those who, until recently, lived among us as members of our community. Human dignity, too, is something we make together. (Footnote 6) By attending to the voices of these performers, we are reminded of the vast network of relations in which we are entangled, directly or indirectly. Within lives in which death always lies latent, we may sense the social character embedded in these deaths and mourn together.
Footnotes
- From a group counseling interview in which the performers/practitioners of Practice of Living participated.
- Myeongjung refers to a red funeral banner bearing the name and social status of the deceased, signifying who they were.
- In trying to understand what this project might mean to the performers/practitioners and how “practice of living” could actually take place, the following words were a source of strength. The sites visited and the moments faced by the performers/practitioners during the process of this project became, perhaps, “other sounds” and “other spaces” that disrupted familiar sensations while easing grief through sharing. “Those who do not think long of the dead need such a place [the 9/11 Memorial Park in the United States]. But for those who spend most of their time thinking only of the dead, what they need are different sounds and different spaces.” — Ueun, The Mourning Ear, citing In-hyun Lee’s novel Da Capo, Hysterian, 2025, p. 62.
- From Minjun Shin’s artist notes.
- When reading the late Kyung-sik Suh’s writings, I came closer to Shin’s own intention: “I want to imagine another world’s possibilities by sharing the memories and pains of deaths that today cannot be remembered.” Suh wrote: “(…) It is the narrow imagination of seeing the present as unrelated to the past that diminishes us and allows the ‘secret and insidious managers’ to proliferate all the more. An important and essential means to cultivate imagination is art, as well as dialogue with others. By meeting and conversing with people who live in different contexts and with different sensibilities yet are exposed to similar risks, our withered imagination is stimulated and opened.” — Juha Jeong, Minseok Baek, Mokoa Hwang, eds., Kyung-sik Suh, Para-dise, Yeollip seoga, 2025, p. 202.
- Pierre-Louis Fort, Mother and Daughter: Writing Mourning, trans. Chi-jung Yu, Moonji Publishing, 2024, pp. 258–259.