Minjun Shin



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Waiting for a Time That Never Arrives

2026
1Channel video, HD(Color),  stereo sound
9’ 1”
















































 Waiting for a Time That Never Arrives is a single-channel moving image work combining self-shot footage, found archival material, and AI-generated images. In this work, memory is approached not as a means of restoring the past, but as a temporal structure through which the coordinates of the present can be critically read. The work is structured through a voice that, from a future moment in 20XX, looks back on a departed person while speaking to the narator’s child. Yet this act of remembrance is not intended to explain an individual life. Rather, it becomes a device for asking how the future once promised by the time in which that person lived has arrived as the reality of today.

The work layers late-1990s and early-2000s visual culture, travel landscapes, degraded media images, found footage, and AI-generated images. These images compose the atmosphere of the era surrounding one person’s life, while also tracing how the words, images, and promises once presented as “the future” have become our present. What matters here is not the explanation of a past event, but the attempt to sense where we now stand within a reality in which the future has already become the present.

Work seeks to critique a present in which the future and utopia are no longer seriously imagined — a present that appears to move forward, yet feels as though it is endlessly idling in place. The time that once appeared as possibility has become the present, but this present does not feel like the fulfilment of a promised future. Instead, it appears as the exhaustion of imagination and the repetition of paralysis. The work asks whether another possibility of time can still be sensed among the ruins of the words and images that once promised the future.