Minjun Shin
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2026
Automotive interior parts, steel frame, urethane foam, gel-medium transfer, spray paint, enamel, polyurethane resin, light
120.0 × 75.0 × 146.0 cm
After obtaining my driving licence, the first time I drove was after my brother’s death, when I travelled to the snow-covered country where he had once lived. Because my family had never owned a car, driving was never simply transport. It carried a strange sensation of growth: unlike when I was a child, I could now drive and move by myself. At the same time, this sensation overlapped with the time I had shared with my brother, and with the loss of a time I could no longer pass through with him. Driving through snowy mountains remains with me as a scene in which growth and loss occurred at once. The mountain-like forms, intense light, and sculptural rhythm of the car parts bring that memory and sensation into the present.
In art history, since the emergence of modernity, the car has often appeared as a symbol of speed, technology, progress, and the future. Yet today, when it is difficult to imagine the future optimistically, I reconsider this symbolism. In a time that seems to be melting, freezing, and moving toward catastrophe, can we imagine the future again? By bringing back car parts once used as signs of futurity, and by weaving into them the impulse toward the future that I have continued to think about after loss, this work becomes a sensory monument that calls futurity into the present.