Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Shon has held two solo exhibitions, 《If Reality Is the Best Metaphor》 (SeMA Storage, Seoul, 2023) and 《A Good Knight》 (Hapjungjigu, Seoul, 2023).

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Shon has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《One Hundred Percent》 (SPACE ÆFTER, Seoul, 2025), the 15th Gwangju Biennale 《Pansori》 (Gwangju, 2024), 《The 24th SONGEUN Art Award Exhibition》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2024), 《Forkingroom: Adrenaline Prompt》 (Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, 2023), 《Re-working Senses》 (Insa Art Space, Seoul, 2022), and 《en route》 (Shinhan Gallery, Seoul, 2022), among others.

Residencies (Selected)

Shon has been selected as an artist-in-residence at programs such as the ARKO Art Studio (Seoul, 2025) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) Residency (Dublin, 2025).

Originality & Identity

Soomin Shon’s practice begins at the fissures between personal experience and social structure. Through the lenses of memory, language, and systems of belief, she examines the hidden mechanisms that govern contemporary society and observes how they manifest as affect within everyday life. Her early work 3 Smartphones, 24 Phone Chargers and 4 Powercords(2018), based on an image of Syrian refugees charging their phones, invites reflection on unconscious prejudices toward “others.” By filming the process of reenacting this photograph, the artist captures the emotional distance between ordinary life and a tragic reality—an experience that marks the beginning of her enduring inquiry into the relationship between self and other, reality and representation, belief and lived experience.

Unmellow Yellow(2017–2025) emerges from her exploration of social relations. Focusing on a yellow fire hydrant that everyone passed by without notice, Shon questions the social implications of “not seeing” and indifference. She asked multiple people to draw the object, later compiling the results into a book and postcards, thereby revealing how a community constructs visual and emotional distance. In the 2024 performance of the same title, she addressed the impossibility of communication through language and moments of mistranslation, declaring that “language creates the borders of the world” and linking language, power, and otherness.

Shon also delves into abstract structures such as belief, value, and order. In her solo exhibition 《If Reality Is the Best Metaphor》(SeMA Storage, 2023), she dealt with human desire and loneliness that exist within the fractures of technological capitalism, deconstructing the illusion of “trust” and “value” in In God We Trust(2023). Starting from the phrase printed on the U.S. dollar, the work expands its focus to cryptocurrency, financial crises, and the origins of social faith, exposing how collective belief constructs reality—and how that reality is always susceptible to collapse.

This trajectory continues in her solo exhibition 《A Good Knight》(Hapjungjigu, 2023) with the video A Good Knight(2023), which likens human society to the rules of chess. Reflecting on individual position within systems of order and hierarchy, Shon poses the question, “Are we the chess pieces, or are we the ones playing the game?” Her attention to the “limits of movement” imposed by social norms extends into Underground(2024), which explores the meaning of humanity in an age of isolation and substitution shaped by technological capitalism.

Style & Contents

Soomin Shon’s formal approach is characterized by movement and expansion across media. While her early works primarily used video to link social events with personal emotion, her later practice incorporates performance, installation, and publications to pursue sensorial experimentation. 3 Smartphones, 24 Phone Chargers and 4 Powercords is a single-channel video that reconstructs a newspaper image, blending documentary precision with reflective tone.

In contrast, Unmellow Yellow is continuously reinterpreted through drawings, books, postcards, and performances, combining collective participation with linguistic performance. Shon extends her work beyond visual objects to encompass relationships and processes of interaction themselves.

Playing Catch(2019/2022) materializes this structure of interaction through sound-based performance. Two performers communicate only through the sound of each other’s breath and voices, revealing the tension and rupture inherent in acts of communication and perception of the other. Shon’s work thus prioritizes the “process of exchange” itself over formal completion in a single medium.

By the time of 《If Reality Is the Best Metaphor》, Shon juxtaposes time-based media with participatory installation to visualize the contradictions within social structures. In God We Trust combines found footage, text, and sound into a montage that reveals how the image of faith is constructed. In contrast, Musicbox(2023/2018) subverts the rhythm of rational society through inefficient performance. Musicbox: Cornu(2023), a metallic sculpture, transforms this sonic act into a static object, inviting reflection on the relationship between labor, technology, and the human body.

A Good Knight questions the boundaries between humanity and machinery, autonomy and control, through the movements of automata. By introducing a mechanical narrator explaining the rules of chess to children, the artist metaphorically exposes the structures that dictate human behavior. In Underground, this line of inquiry moves “below ground,” depicting the paradox of efficiency and isolation generated by technology and capturing the emotional state of an era in which human labor becomes increasingly abstracted.

Topography & Continuity

Soomin Shon’s practice occupies a key position within contemporary Korean art’s discourse of “affective social critique” through her distinctive method of translating personal experience into an examination of social structures. In revealing invisible frameworks such as networks, language, and belief systems, she pairs emotional resonance with bodily sensitivity, reflecting on society not through grand narratives but through intimate, perceptual ones. In doing so, her work restores the subtle human affect often overlooked in contemporary media art.

While her themes have expanded from explorations of otherness to investigations of language, belief, capital, and technology, the core remains the same: the individual within society. The fire hydrant in Unmellow Yellow, the repetitive gestures in Musicbox, and the chessboard and automata in A Good Knight—all serve as metaphorical devices exposing the rules that govern human existence within social systems.

As seen in her recent work Underground, Shon examines how human emotion and the body are positioned within the shadow of technological capitalism, visualizing societal fractures through a sensory and poetic language. Her work expands social critique into the realm of emotional realism, suggesting new directions for media-based art.

Looking ahead, Shon’s residencies at the ARKO Art Studio (Seoul, 2025) and the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA, Dublin, 2025) will likely broaden her engagement with global systems and ideologies beyond local contexts. Having consistently translated the contradictions of social structures into poetic images grounded in everyday experience, her future trajectory will further intersect technology and emotion, the individual and the collective, across international discourse.