Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Shin Min’s solo exhibitions include 《Ew! Hair in My Food!》 (P21, Seoul, 2025), 《semi 世美》 (The Great Collection, Seoul, 2022), 《People Made of Paper》 (Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2017), 《The Gigantic Golden Arch》 (Seoul art space seogyo, Seoul, 2015), 《We’re all made of ___》 (Place MAK, Seoul, 2014), and more.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

She also participated in group exhibitions at various institutions, including the 7th Changwon Sculpture Biennale (Changwon, 2024), SeMA Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, 2024), Jeonbuk Museum of Art (Jeonbuk, 2024), and Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (Busan, 2023).

Awards (Selected)

Shin is the inaugural winner of the MGM Discoveries Art Prize at Art Basel Hong Kong 2025.

Residencies (Selected)

Shin Min has participated in several notable residency programs, including Sindang Creative Arcade (2015), Incheon Art Platform (2016), Nanji Residency (2020), Geumcheon Art Space (2021), and Got: Art & Community Space (2024).

Collections (Selected)

Her works are included in the collection of Jeonbuk Museum of Art, Mirae High School of Science and Technology, and Ulsan Nodong 1987.

Originality & Identity

Shin Min has consistently questioned the oppression, emotional labor, and bodily discipline imposed on women in Korea’s low-wage, high-intensity labor environments. Her work often originates from the emotion of “anger” and projects her multifaceted identity as a woman, service worker, and art laborer.

Early sculptures such as Kyungsook(2006) and the ‘Crying Women’(2006–2010) series depict wide-eyed, tear-streaked female faces, transforming unspoken emotional residue into form. These figures function not only as explorations of self but also as a sculptural language representing the collective silencing and repression of women.

Later, Shin expanded her practice to critique the capitalist imposition of “cleanliness,” “neatness,” and “kindness” on women based on her own experiences in the service industry. In the solo exhibition 《Semi 世美》(2022, The Great Collection), she introduced small, comically exaggerated figurines titled ‘Semi,’ inspired by English nicknames commonly used by franchise workers, representing real-life laborers.

More recently, works like My Reflection in My Mind(2024), shown in the group exhibition 《Make a Wish》(2024, SeMA Buk-Seoul Museum of Art), invite audience participation, dissolving the boundary between individual desire and collective solidarity, and exploring how “sculpture” can serve as a medium for shared emotion.

Style & Contents

Shin Min consistently uses disposable, everyday materials such as paper, pencils, styrofoam, and McDonald’s French fry bags, demonstrating a coherent material philosophy. Her early work involved layering paper repeatedly on busts to concentrate and manifest emotion.

In Part-Time Worker in Downward Dog Pose(2014), she escalated to large-scale sculpture using discarded McDonald’s packaging, directly linking labor experience and worker identity. This piece blends the yoga pose promoted by corporations for sciatica with the military-style “get down” command, revealing the contradictions in corporate healing discourse.

Paper, her most frequently used material, is physically fragile and easily worn, but for Shin it is a living substance—a talisman holding prayers, a vessel of emotions and passion. In Our Prayer – I do not hate my coworkers, I love them, I embrace them, I stand in solidarity(2022), she builds flesh out of torn paper and renders the faces of female workers with graphite and colored pencil, exposing the realities of emotional labor.

Her recent piece Let’s Take a Selfie Together❤️(2024) presents a group of high school girls connected through SNS taking a selfie, visualizing a new form of self-expression and solidarity. Through the fusion of fragile material and intense gaze, Shin Min transforms the intersection of emotion and social structure into physical form.

Topography & Continuity

Since the mid-2000s, Shin Min has consistently disrupted the formality and authority of sculpture by centering the “fragile, erasable body” rather than sculptural monumentality. She visualizes the lives of the marginalized through the physicality of sculpture.

While early works focused on personal emotions, her recent practice expands to communal sentiment, gestures of solidarity, and digital performance.

Her 'Semi 世美' (2022~) series broadens beyond sculpture to include flyers, drawings, performance, radio, and other media. She uses social media as a strategy for disseminating her work, seeking to bridge the gap between art and society.

Lacking formal academic training in art, Shin relies on intuition and emotional sensitivity over sculptural technique, and this irregularity has opened new possibilities for subjective representation in contemporary art.

After presenting Usual Suspects(2025) at Art Basel Hong Kong and winning the MGM Discoveries Art Prize, she is expected to continue sculptural practices that transform the emotional structure of Korean society into visual language, expanding her solidarity with the marginalized onto the global stage.