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
Rather than functioning as a conventional monument that fixes and preserves an event from the past, the work proposes a monument as a temporal mediator placed between memories that continue to move after loss and a future that has not yet arrived.
The work begins from an experience of movement that took place after the death of the artist’s younger sibling, when the artist travelled to the snow-covered place where he had once stayed. Here, driving is not simply a means of transport, but a way of moving toward someone with whom one can no longer travel, and an act of passing once again through the traces of a time that has already disappeared. The sensation of passing through snowy mountains remains as a scene in which growth and loss, movement and stillness, arrival and absence overlap.
The automotive parts appear as material remnants of what once symbolised speed, technology, progress, and the future. Yet in this work, they are reconfigured not as signs of a smooth and optimistic future, but as fragments of an era in which it has become difficult to imagine the future at all. The unstable masses added with urethane foam, roughly transferred images, artificial surfaces, and intense light bring memories of the past and unrealised futures into collision within a single sculptural body.
This monument does not commemorate a completed history or a heroic event. Instead, it calls forth a time once felt as possibility but never reached, and the remnants of futurity that continue to be sensed after loss. Rather than returning to the past through memory, the work seeks to sense again, within the remains of the past, an impulse toward the future that has not yet been exhausted. In this sense, the sculpture becomes both a monument for a departed person and a time that has passed, and a sensory coordinate directed toward a time that has not yet arrived.
The work begins from an experience of movement that took place after the death of the artist’s younger sibling, when the artist travelled to the snow-covered place where he had once stayed. Here, driving is not simply a means of transport, but a way of moving toward someone with whom one can no longer travel, and an act of passing once again through the traces of a time that has already disappeared. The sensation of passing through snowy mountains remains as a scene in which growth and loss, movement and stillness, arrival and absence overlap.
The automotive parts appear as material remnants of what once symbolised speed, technology, progress, and the future. Yet in this work, they are reconfigured not as signs of a smooth and optimistic future, but as fragments of an era in which it has become difficult to imagine the future at all. The unstable masses added with urethane foam, roughly transferred images, artificial surfaces, and intense light bring memories of the past and unrealised futures into collision within a single sculptural body.
This monument does not commemorate a completed history or a heroic event. Instead, it calls forth a time once felt as possibility but never reached, and the remnants of futurity that continue to be sensed after loss. Rather than returning to the past through memory, the work seeks to sense again, within the remains of the past, an impulse toward the future that has not yet been exhausted. In this sense, the sculpture becomes both a monument for a departed person and a time that has passed, and a sensory coordinate directed toward a time that has not yet arrived.