Shin Junmin — Fantasia of Light and Darkness
Hyung Dami / Senior Curator, Mimesis Art Museum
The Mimesis Art Museum presents the ninth exhibition of the Mimesis Artist Project, an ongoing series that highlights the worlds constructed by painters between the ages of 35 and 45 as they explore the social role of the artist through their practice. Selected through an open call, Shin Junmin, Lee Sejoon, and Jung Yumi reveal the painterly experiments that define their distinct approaches.
Euphoria—derived from Greek, filtered through Latin, and entering English as a state of intense happiness and sustained joy—serves as a conceptual through-line for this exhibition. Shin Junmin engages this sensation through the fierce energy of light; Lee Sejoon through images drawn from the sweep of the everyday; Jung Yumi through depictions of vast natural flows such as water and wind. Each artist immerses themselves in this heightened sensorial state, ultimately confronting a form of rapture, a euphoric charge embedded in their work. Their paintings appear to exist in a realm parallel to everyday reality, a different dimension that seems detached from the tangible world. As if living in two parallel universes, the artists traverse back and forth between the real and the pictorial. Their individual experiments unfold on the stage of the exhibition, where they encounter viewers—suggesting the possibility that this euphoria may expand from personal to collective experience. As the exhibition begins, the viewer embarks on a journey of euphoria that unfolds throughout the Mimesis space.
As one follows the delicate yet expansive brushwork of Jung Yumi—like breath spreading across curved space—natural light flows along architectural arcs. Lee Sejoon’s puzzle-like canvases, in which the significant and the insignificant collide, gradually dissolve the spatial groundedness of reality. And then, Shin Junmin’s intense light and darkness burst forth like unfiltered shouts of elation, reverberating beyond the surface and resonating through the geometric space of the gallery. The euphoria embodied in this exhibition gestures toward the possibility that an ideal emotional state might be formed within reality and shared with its audience—perhaps even culminating in an experience approaching the utopian.
Shin Junmin paints light. In his works, the blazing white radiance of artificial light fuses with the heat and exhilaration of a stadium, erupting like fireworks into a single, monumental mass. The abstract and expressive rendering of luminous clusters and particles is inseparable from the painter’s own emotional release—the feeling of bursting exhilaration. For Shin, the baseball stadium is both a long-standing subject and an inexhaustible source of inspiration. One early work, Field (2015), depicts the exuberant scene of a densely packed crowd in heavy, saturated tones, amplifying the concentrated energy of the moment on a monumental scale.
Light became the protagonist in Shin’s practice when the desolate cityscapes—once a source of unfamiliar fascination—were transformed into the ordinary backdrops of pandemic life. Earlier works such as Walk (2017) and Blue Sound(2019) capture the eerie stillness of deserted urban structures and seem, at first glance, to stand in stark contrast to his ongoing light series. Yet the moment one recognizes that the depiction of luminous particles in White Fairy (2024), Flood Lighting (2024), and other stadium-light paintings shares a deep kinship with the unseen forces rendered through swift, accumulated lines and paint fragments in White Wind (2017) and Ghost (2020), it becomes clear that Shin has been refining a singular visual language for over a decade.
Whether the paint on his brush ignites into a blinding white blaze on the canvas or darkens into dense layers through subtractive mixtures of multiple colors in order to depict crowds and fencing, Shin’s gestures do not fundamentally change. The density remains. Night Light (2023), nearly engulfed in darkness, initially appears as the most anomalous of his works. Yet as one gazes into the vast, black expanse, the space begins to feel full rather than empty—charged rather than void. In recognizing that this painting is, in essence, no different from Shin’s more dazzling compositions, we may realize that we have, at last, entered into the heart of his euphoria.
