Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

His recent solo exhibitions include 《Prophecy & Scenario》 (Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2025), 《Last of Us》 (SAHNG-UP Gallery Euljiro, Seoul, 2023), 《Lift & Drift》 (SongEun Art Space, Seoul, 2021), and 《Acrobat》 (Art Space BOAN2, Seoul, 2021).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Selected group exhibitions include 《Ordinary World》 (Korean Cultural Center, Paris, 2024), 《Anxieties, when Shared》 (Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Past. Present. Future.》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2022), 《Young Korean Artists 2021》 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, 2021), and 《DOOSAN Art Lab: Part 2》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2019).

Awards (Selected)

Shin has received several prestigious awards, including the Best Video Art Work, FilmÓptico Art Visual and Film Festival, Madrid (2021),  Ilhyun Travel Grant Best Award, Ulji Foundation, Seoul (2014), Brighton Award, University of Brighton, UK (2010).

Residencies (Selected)

He has participated in artist-in-residence programs such as the SeMA Nanji Residency (2023), SongEun Artist Studio (2020), and MMCA Residency Goyang (2017).

Collections (Selected)

His works are included in the collections of the MMCA Art Bank, Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation, and ARGOS Centre for Audiovisual Arts.

Originality & Identity

Shin Jungkyun has continuously visualized the emotional state of anxiety inherent in the real world. His work twists the boundaries between personal experience and collective memory, reality and fiction, universality and specificity, revealing the ideological structures and emotional fractures hidden within.

In his early work Universal Story(2010), he used the universalized male experience of military service as a backdrop to attempt a recovery of individual identity homogenized by national ideology. By reexamining public spaces through private memories, the artist captures the structural anxiety embedded in the fissures of everyday life.

Subsequent works such as Uncovered Trace(2013) and A Song Written in Okryuche (2013) visualize the ideological traces hidden in everyday life, grounded in the artist's experience growing up in a divided nation. Through specific typefaces and objects, he summons the affective undercurrents beneath the surface, exposing the substance of anxiety born from them. This reflects Shin’s philosophical pursuit of revealing the existence of what cannot be seen.

Later works such as the 'Numbers Station' series (2015–2016) deal with the inaccessibility of the external world and the uncertainty of information. By engaging with the real espionage technique of numbers stations and integrating fictional narratives, he destabilizes the boundary between reality and fiction, inducing an unstable perception of "truth" in the viewer. Following the pandemic, A Person Walking on Tiptoe (2021) sensorially constructs the form of anxiety directly tied to survival through bodily action.

His recent works Valley & Holes(2023) and Instructions for G2 Lab Manager (2025) address issues of preservation, archiving, and trust. While based on real events and locations, these works combine fictional video narratives and audiovisual staging to reveal the instability and fictional foundations of institutional systems. This evolution illustrates the expansion of the artist's interest from personal experience to social structures and the mechanisms of technological and informational environments.

Style & Contents

Based on the medium of video and the documentary format, Shin Jungkyun has constructed multilayered narratives by blending mockumentary, performance documentation, spatial installation, and meta-archival structures. In Universal Story, he presents an autobiographical documentary that merges footage from his actual military service with narration, exposing the collision between private memory and public structure.

In Uncovered Trace, he enhances his practice of observation, collection, and re-editing by overlaying meaning onto mundane objects and places. In the following A Song Written in Okryuche, he emphasizes the ideological nature of language through visual coding (specific typefaces) and manipulation of K-pop lyrics, reconstructing the everyday through image editing to make it unfamiliar.

The 'Numbers Station' series unfolds the concealed structure of information and location through a combination of spatial installation and video. Notably, Numbers Station_Hongik Univ.(2016) inserts fictional storytelling into leftover spaces within the exhibition venue, transforming the exhibition space itself into a site of surveillance and concealment. These works, while fictional in premise, are grounded in real spaces and sensory cues, allowing the viewer to participate directly in the narrative.

In recent works, Shin combines video installation with documents, sound, lighting, and prints to materialize systems and technological environments. Steganography Tutorial (2019) adopts the format of a YouTube tutorial to transform the encryption process into a performative act, while Instructions for G2 Lab Manager maximizes psychological immersion through fictional documents and sound design. This method expands Shin’s unique directorial language from narrative construction to the spatial scale of sensory perception and structural anxiety.

Topography & Continuity

Shin Jungkyun’s work has consistently proposed new perceptual frameworks for understanding reality, centered around the keyword of "anxiety." In his early practice, he focused on recording and reconstructing individual experiences formed within structural mechanisms of Korean society, such as the military, division, and ideology. Later, his attention expanded toward revealing the uncertainty and fictionality of hidden systems within the flow of information and technology.

His work excels in observing everyday landscapes and events multilaterally, extracting signs and sensations from them, and weaving them into fictional narratives. Crossing genres and technologies such as mockumentary, steganography, and the recontextualization of real spaces, Shin has developed a sophisticated multi-narrative structure rare in contemporary art.

This approach has shaped a contemporary media art language that is applicable both domestically and internationally and explains why his work has been acquired by various art institutions and featured in residency programs. Particularly, his method of disturbing the relationships between reality and fiction, surveillance and anonymity, and individual and system in the post-digital technological environment has positioned him as a key figure in contemporary audiovisual art.

Looking ahead, Shin is expected to further expand his reach into global technological and institutional contexts, developing more complex and politically layered narrative structures rooted in reality.