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Shin Sun joo

  • 신선주 1번 이미지
Introduction of Artist
Shin Sun Joo employs a technique of scratching into canvases densely layered with oil pastel, moving beyond the mere reproduction of photographic moments to reconstruct the stratified nature of memory. By erasing from a surface saturated with darkness to reveal emerging forms, his paintings articulate a paradoxical structure in which images are generated not through addition, but through subtraction.

His method has been described by a curator as a Manière noire. This term does not merely denote a preference for dark tonality; rather, it articulates an approach in which darkness absorbs light, condensing space and time into a material field. Black, in this context, functions not as background but as density — a charged spatial condition from which form is excavated.

The artist’s scratching process bears a structural affinity to mezzotint, a form of intaglio printmaking historically referred to in French as manière noire. As in mezzotint—where the plate is first darkened and light gradually revealed—Shin’s paintings follow a similar logic, allowing forms to surface from within darkness. He softens oil pastel with the warmth of his fingertips, pressing it into the canvas, and subsequently incises the surface with a sharp metal stylus to construct the image. The process demands a level of concentration akin to sculptural labor. As one critic has suggested in comparing his practice to tapestry weaving, Shin’s work traverses photography, printmaking, and painting, resulting in a rigorously constructed visual field.

Traveling across various cities, the artist has photographed architecturally resonant structures—sites not chosen for mere aesthetic appeal, but for their historical sedimentation and temporal density. Having studied both photography and painting, Shin persistently engages in translating photography’s indexical immediacy into a painterly language.

In the transfer from photograph to canvas, architectural forms are reconstructed through fields of black, white, and gray. Black establishes depth and mass; white opens zones of illumination and suspension; gray mediates as a liminal register where visible reality emerges. These tonal territories generate a structural tension between light and darkness, presence and absence.

Shin does not reproduce buildings in their entirety. Instead, he selectively reveals fragments within a darkened field, allowing certain structural elements to emerge while others recede into obscurity. At times architecture is submerged to emphasize its weight; at others it is pushed into backlight, isolating rhythm and contour within luminous tension. This selective framing evokes cinematic composition, forming a compressed visual architecture akin to a remembered scene.

The photographed site and the artist’s recollected memory converge upon the canvas, producing a space that is simultaneously actual and interpreted. For viewers who have not physically encountered these places, the work becomes a mediated encounter — a “real fictive space” in which reality and memory intersect.

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