Sculpture after 1600 ----- Jean Shin

               

               Sculpture is another form of artistic presentation and has different kinds of medium to illustrate creator’s thoughts. Before, I thought only those made by clay or stone can be called sculpture, but the more I comprehend it the more fascinated I get. There is a South Korea American artist who was born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea; her name is Jean Shin, she is known for her labor-intensive sculpture and she usually uses common materials that is easy to be found like worn shoes, lost socks, broken umbrellas, discarded lottery tickets, and prescription pill bottles. One of her famous work is called “Sound wave” which is made by 78-rpm records and all of them were melted and sculpted to form a cascading wave.  According to the painted note gallery’s blog “the resulting sculpture is a comment on the wave-like nature of audio technologies, 78 records were swept away by the 33-rpm mono records, which were swept away by 33-rpm stereo records, which were supplanted by tapes.” Her work combined abstract art and representation art together. It made the sound experiential and makes us feel the strong power of the music. According to the research that I did about her background I found that “Jean Shin's artwork references a wide range of art historical precedents, from minimalism, with its unyielding repetition of singular forms, to feminism, with its focus on traditional craft techniques, and Arte Povera, with its connection to everyday life.”(Sarah Mmortimer,2011) Her artwork is belonging to Arte Povera, which means poor art. Italian art critic Germano Celant used Arte Povera to describe a broad category of art that produced by an international cross section of artists in the late 1960s through the 1970s. But now we usually use it to apply only to Italian art of that period. “Celant related street theater and other anti-elitist, ‘poor’ forms of expression and protest to this artistic style; the term ‘poor’ also referred to the humble, often ephemeral materials employed and the anti-institutional quality that originally pervaded this art. Arte Povera usually incorporates organic and industrial materials in ways that reveal the conflicts between the natural and the man-made.”  Jean Shin influenced by the Arte Povera movement, so all of her artworks are really massive and have additionally visual pun.  As we can see from the second picture that I found, she used 22,528 recycled computer keycaps and 192 custom keycaps, fabric, customized active keyboard and interactive software, video projection and painted aluminum armatures. All of her production is massive and give people huge visual shock.