Kang Mi-Jeong

Shin Junmin is a painter of landscapes. Since his student days, he wandered through various corners of Daegu in search of scenes to paint. What first caught his eye were spaces of artificial spectacle—zoos, baseball stadiums, and similar sites. Soon after, however, he began to translate onto canvas the landscapes and subjects that seized his attention during his solitary walks. Like Charles Baudelaire’s “painter of modern life,” Constantin Guys, Shin roamed the city without fixed purpose, an anonymous individual living within the metropolis. At times he moved through the streets like a hungry lion in search of prey; at other times, like an innocent child or a patient in recovery. Yet unlike the nineteenth century flâneur Guys who surveyed fleeting and novel Parisian scenes amid the crowd the twenty-first century walker Shin Junmin indulged in accidental yet inevitable encounters with the ordinary and the familiar. For a time, he rendered desolate vacant lots, deserted riversides, and the hollow, lonesome exteriors of seemingly uninhabited apartment buildings in somber blue tones. Even so, for both Guys and Shin, wandering the streets and painting were inescapable adventures.

What elevates Shin’s wandering beyond mere aimlessness is his distinctive experience of seeing. As art historian and psychologist Ernst Gombrich has persuasively argued, visual perception is not the mechanical intake of sensory data but an active mental process. Contemporary neuroscience has further revealed that from the moment light reflected from objects reaches the retina, our visual system selectively chooses what to see based on diagram and memory. The artist explains: “I encounter objects or landscapes that have certain wavelengths. Perhaps these encounters… are meetings with things whose emotional wavelengths are similar to my own.” While roaming the streets in search of something to paint, Shin’s eye and ear were repeatedly drawn to scenes that felt desolate and melancholic yet offered him a strange sense of calm. The light and sound he experienced—more precisely, the visual and auditory wavelengths—stimulated his sensibility and likely summoned of memory and imagination.

Human presence is scarce in Shin’s paintings. When figures do appear in the distance, they dissolve into the landscape. His uninhabited, solitary scenes are submerged in blue tones—from pale sky-bluish hues to deep indigos—and the downward trails of paint sometimes resemble tears. Because Shin frequently dilutes his pigments with large amounts of turpentine, the physical properties of the medium become visible: paint drips and blends, creating unexpected chromatic effects through mixture and overlap. His landscapes, enriched by such intentional chance, oscillate between the representation of external subjects and the expression of an internal world. His semi-abstract largescale works evoke both late twentieth-century German Neo-Expressionism and, at the same time, appear as introspective self portraits perhaps because, as he says, they depict scenes whose emotional frequencies resonate with his own.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began and streets emptied, rendering the city eerily silent, the artist sought instead radiant natural settings filled with sunlight. Among the works he produced between 2021 and 2023 are paintings capturing shimmering water surfaces—such as Water Light (2021) and White Light (2023). The swimmers in the distance appear only as muted shadows near the top of the canvas, while the droplets of light—rendered as “white shadows” on the water—glitter delicately along the ripples. Around this time, Shin’s landscapes appear to drift away from expressionistic representation toward impressionistic expression. Like nineteenth-century painters committed to the “realism of the eyes,” he walked outdoors, taking as his subject objects that reflect sunlight. And just as the Impressionists paid more attention to the light that touched their subjects than to the subjects themselves, Shin drew light into the very center of his practice. Whereas the flow of paints in his earlier melancholic cityscapes intensified their sense of desolation, the paint flows in the “white shadow” works evoke yearning or nostalgia rather than sorrow. Meanwhile, works such as Night Light (2021) and Forest of Light (2022) affirm that the artist has not abandoned the visualization of the unseen. Artificial lights blazing within darkness, contrasted with barren surroundings, reveal his continued fascination with making invisible worlds visible.

In his solo exhibition White Shadow, Shin radicalizes his engagement with light, presenting works that focus not on objects illuminated by light but on light itself as the primary subject of representation. He has, of course, painted lights before. In the mid-2010s, during his Baseball Stadium series, he depicted stadium lighting towers alongside other structures with his characteristic expressive brushwork—a process through which he retraced childhood memories of frequent visits to the ballpark. His works Spotlight (2022) and Flood Lighting (2024) revisit similar motifs. But in recent years, his gaze has shifted from monumental structures to the lights that emanate from them—lights that cascade like waterfalls. As he committed more deeply to representing light itself, the structural clarity of the stadium lights visible a decade earlier gradually dissolved, while the representation of light became increasingly abstract.

The exhibition’s most striking large-scale work, Light Flower (2024), afterimage of light reflected on window in his studio. Among the subjects he paints most frequently are exactly these “white shadows”—the faint, geometric shapes that appear when sunlight hits glazed windows. Since around 2022, he has repeatedly rendered these luminous silhouettes on canvases both large and small. Earlier versions of Light Flower represent these residual forms as white diamond shapes set within circles or spheres; in this new monumental canvas, however, the diamond pattern appears faint and blurred, contrasted sharply with the clearly defined window frame. The heavy frame establishes a strong vertical axis, while the lightly drawn power lines outside soften this rigidity. Another Light Flower(2024), also shown in White Shadow, initially appears to be a simple color-field painting but contains within it a diamond-shaped white shadow. Many viewers unfamiliar with the subject may easily read Shin’s Light Flower works as abstractions. Ironically, however, each one is a faithful depiction of the real residual patterns created when sunlight or artificial light shines through frosted glass. To share this phenomenon with viewers, Shin installed a window in a corner of the gallery; the white pattern left by the flickering light behind the glass confirms that the artist painted precisely what he observed.

Shin’s representations of light generally follow two modes: abstract patterning and a series of tree works. The abstract patterns derive from light traces reflected on glass. In addition to the large Light Flower canvases, he exhibited seven sketches of light shadows whose vigorous brushwork evokes Abstract Expressionism. Yet these studies, as one might guess, depict the shimmering patterns of reflected light and the silhouettes of trees mirrored on glass as they catch natural and artificial illumination. In the tree series—titled Wind Tree and Cloud Tree—his focus remains fixed on light. In the large 2023 oil painting Wind Tree, light appears as playful dots and small planes of color. In the newer Wind Tree shown in this exhibition, bold and forceful lines that suggest swirling wind become the primary means by which light is rendered.

My earlier remark—that Shin appears to have moved “from expressionistic representation to impressionistic expression”—stems from the multifaceted painterly experiments evident in his recent works. One may ask: what, indeed, distinguishes expressionistic representation from impressionistic expression? For an artist devoted to the sustained practice of painting in its traditional form, like Shin, the distinction is significant. Since the beginning of his career more than a decade ago, he has consistently transcribed commonplace everyday landscapes into the canvas through his expressive brushwork and color—a practice oriented toward representation rather than the communication of particular messages. In recent years, however, by making light itself the subject of representation, his work has come to exhibit impressionistic tendencies. The Impressionists are often described as “painters of light,” yet what they truly painted were objects receiving (or failing to receive) light. Shin, by contrast, is a painter who quite literally paints light—the sparkle on ripples, the reflection off leaves, the residual patterns cast on glass. As he painted these lights, he became increasingly sensitive to the movement of the sun and the flicker of streetlamps. Every light he studied was expressed through a visual language unique to his sensibility, and several of these works appear in White Shadow.

I recall my first visit to Shin’s studio. The space—neither small nor large—was lined with enormous canvases, eliciting my immediate exclamation of surprise. When I asked, somewhat foolishly, “When did you paint all of these?” he merely smiled quietly. What astonished me was not the quantity but the steadfastness with which he remained committed to painting in an era when media proliferate and the boundaries between popular and fine art grow increasingly indistinct. Today, many visitors seek museums for their spectacles—architectural installations or massive screen-based works that, to some, provide more excitement than formulaic television dramas or blockbuster films. Perhaps it is because I so rarely encounter artists who devote themselves so earnestly to painting within this shifting landscape that his monumental canvases felt so refreshing.

Recent archaeological findings suggest that humans began painting nearly fifty thousand years ago. In that sense, painting may be something akin to an instinct for our species. Technologies and trends will come and go, yet painting, I suspect, will remain steadfast. As I stood before Shin’s recent works—which, despite their heightened luminosity, still carry a residue of solitude—I found myself reflecting anew on what painting means to us.