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Los Angeles, California, USA • b. 1963
Kyungmi Shin’s practice critically examines the cultural entanglements produced by colonial expansion, war, global trade, and the transnational movement of people, foregrounding how these forces shape material culture and systems of representation. Kyungmi Shin situates her practice within a critical interrogation of Asian-American diasporic identity, foregrounding the cultural, economic, and scientific legacies of colonial trade. Working across painting, sculpture, and textiles, she mobilizes a network of aesthetic and theoretical references that trace the transnational circuits of Orientalism, colonial extraction, and epistemological authority. Her layered compositions are sites of disruption in which disparate sources—archival photographs, chinoiserie wallpaper, medieval manuscript illumination, and Korean shamanistic cosmologies—are appropriated, fragmented, and reconfigured, destabilizing the ideological frameworks that have shaped representations of Asia and its diasporas. Through these strategies of citation and recombination, Shin exposes the constructedness of visual and material histories while foregrounding hybridity and temporal disjunction as tools for reimagining systems of knowledge and subjectivity.
