Minjun Shin
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2026
AI-generated images; documentary photographs and documents, video footages from the Korean IMF crisis; objects 3D print object; acrylic displays; barbed wire; lighting
Dimension Variable
As a kind of index of the real world, the archive has often been used in contemporary art as a device that recalls facts from the past and generates the political effects of remembrance. Yet must the archive remain only a means of remembering a painful past? Can it also function as a critical device for questioning a damaged present and imagining a new future? This work begins from these questions.
The work is based on an IF scenario in which Korea chose a different political path after the Asian Financial Crisis, or IMF crisis, which decisively shaped the direction of Korean society in the 1990s. Through this scenario, the work brings into the present traces of a world that may once have been possible, but was never realised.
Based on research into Korean visuality, the artist creates objects that might have existed in an imagined Korean society. Presented together with found images and historical documents related to the IMF crisis, these objects form a fictional archive for Korea in 20XX. This archive includes objects that signify members of parliament representing different forms of labour and expertise, a social inheritance system for the next generation, social housing closer to the original purpose of the apartment, a North Korean leader who openly reveals their gender identity after reunification, and a civil partnership system.
Through this, contemporary Korean society is reread not as the only inevitable reality, but as one path among many possible alternatives. Through the arrangement of visual surfaces that feel familiar yet estranged, the work treats the archive not as a record of the past, but as a constellation of signs through which other historical possibilities can be sensed.
The work is based on an IF scenario in which Korea chose a different political path after the Asian Financial Crisis, or IMF crisis, which decisively shaped the direction of Korean society in the 1990s. Through this scenario, the work brings into the present traces of a world that may once have been possible, but was never realised.
Based on research into Korean visuality, the artist creates objects that might have existed in an imagined Korean society. Presented together with found images and historical documents related to the IMF crisis, these objects form a fictional archive for Korea in 20XX. This archive includes objects that signify members of parliament representing different forms of labour and expertise, a social inheritance system for the next generation, social housing closer to the original purpose of the apartment, a North Korean leader who openly reveals their gender identity after reunification, and a civil partnership system.
Through this, contemporary Korean society is reread not as the only inevitable reality, but as one path among many possible alternatives. Through the arrangement of visual surfaces that feel familiar yet estranged, the work treats the archive not as a record of the past, but as a constellation of signs through which other historical possibilities can be sensed.