Shen Xin examines a broad range of topics in their moving image installations, from personal history to the act of translation, as well as diaspora, statelessness, migration, and structures of power.
Read MoreIn 2012, Shen received their BA Fine Art from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. They graduated with an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2014.
Often beginning with research, Shen creates multi-channel installation that combine fictional narratives with documentary footage, photographs, performance, motion capture videos, and television clips.
Several of Shen's works revolve around Buddhism, and consider its incorporation into different cultural contexts around the world. The essay film Strongholds (2016) merges documentary and fiction, following a pair of women as they visit Samye Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Scotland. Provocation of the Nightingale (2017) addresses multiple belief systems – not only Buddhism, but also scientific practices such as genetic testing, through a scripted conversation between two actors on a stage.
The act of translation is an integral part of Shen's practice, whose process typically sees a script written by the artist, and subsequently translated into the native languages of their actors. Shen may request the actors to modify the scripts during their performance, after which the resulting dialogue is re-translated in subtitles, which are often in English.
Different types of translation feature across the four-channel video installation, Commerce des Esprits (2018). Two animation channels depict motion captures of the narrators, one of whom is Shen's mother reading a monologue in Chinese, while the other attempts a translation of the artist's father's comatose state before passing away. In the other two channels, texts reference the ways in which the work of Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi has been translated into English and French.
The titular work of Shen's solo exhibition, ས་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་འགྱུར། (The Earth Turned Green) (2022) at New York's Swiss Institute traces the passage of time over a day in each season. In the accompanying audio, Shen and their Tibetan language teacher Ji Ta Zong describe the movement of stage lighting and colour in Mandarin and Tibetan. Shen's motivation to learn Tibetan was inspired by the discovery, through genetic testing, that their late father had Tibetan and Indian ancestry.
Narratives around displacement and statelessness are central themes in Shen's Brine Lake (A New Body) (2020), a video installation set in a fictional iodine recycling factory. Featuring actors who converse in Korean, Japanese, and Russian, the work alludes to Korean diasporic histories, and the displacement of 150,000 Koreans to Sakhalin Island during Japanese rule in the early 1940s.
Following its premiere at the Gwangju Biennale in 2021, Brine Lake was later shown in Shen's solo exhibition, Brine Lake (A New Body) (2021) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Shen Xin's work has been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Shen Xin: Brine Lake (A New Body), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021); Double Feature, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2019); half-sung, half-spoken, Serpentine Galleries, London (2017).
Group exhibitions include ON | OFF 2021: Carousel of Progress, He Art Museum, Guangdong (2022); Force Majeure, Eli Klein Gallery, New York (2020); Afterimage: Dangdai Yishu, Lisson Gallery, London (2019).
Shen Xin's website can be found here, and their Instagram can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2022
