Minjun Shin
About
Works
Moving Images
Exhibitions
Cultural Activisms
Texts
- CV
- Contact
신민준 Minjun Shin
b.1992 Busan, South Korea
Based in Seoul and London
Minjun Shin is a Korean artist and cultural activist based between Seoul and London. His work often begins with personal loss, yet he does not confine the resulting experiences of memory, depression, and mourning to the private sphere. He approaches memory not as personal recollection or a fixed record of the past, but as a temporal coordinate through which to trace how individual experience has been shaped and mediated by political and economic conditions. The present therefore appears not as a singular moment, but as a time in which remnants of the past and unrealised futures are entangled. Through these overlapping temporal layers, Shin reads the present critically and asks why the desire to imagine alternative futures—the utopian impulse—has become increasingly difficult to sustain and is dismissed as naïve or absurd. By revealing the conditions that produce this impossibility, he seeks to create a sense that the present is not the only possible reality.
Working across moving image, installation, sculpture, archival and community-based practices, Shin combines found footage, objects, and documents with self-shot footage, fabricated objects, essays, fictional narratives, and speculative devices. Images from different sources and temporalities collide and overlap nonlinearly, while degraded footage, fragile or mutable materials such as paraffin, and intense light translate unstable experiences of time and the utopian impulse into spatial and material relationships. Rather than restoring or authenticating the past, his use of the archive rearranges disparate traces to render the familiar present strange. Community-based work also forms an important part of his practice: dialogue, workshops, and time spent together become methods of making and create a space in which other worlds can be imagined collectively.
This practice is informed by historical materialist thought, which understands individual experience and memory as coordinates within historical time. His attempt to connect individual experience to broader social structures—or totality—has developed at the intersection of personal loss and his subsequent long-term involvement in cultural activism. Through this approach, he traces the historical time sedimented within memory and explores the utopian impulses that persist within it. For Shin, however, utopia is neither a blueprint for a perfected society nor an optimistic image of the future. It takes the form of a critical stance that refuses to accept the present order as the only possible reality and seeks to re-sense possibilities that have been erased or left unrealised within it. Across different media, his work brings fragments of image and matter, memory and fiction into collision, creating a critical distance from the present and activating the possibility of other temporalities that have yet to arrive.