VSF is pleased to present citizen, not barbarian, Kyungmi Shin’s first exhibition with the gallery. Shin’s exhibition explores her family’s histories, identities and migrations by interrogating global colonialism, its relationship to and effect on the multiple languages that frame who we are, how we see and what we know.
The exhibition title is a quote from Edouard Glissant’s “Poetics of Relation” where he describes the otherness and its internal and external positionality beyond how it’s understood through a Western lens that orders and sustains systematic hierarchies. Glissant focuses on opacity – a lack of transparency for and toward the other – that can “coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.” Looking at the “Other” as a citizen and not a barbarian.
Shin’s work asks a myriad of potent questions surrounding the complex entanglement between faith, positions of power, and the exchange (and mutation) of cultural and intellectual capital between the east and the west. At the center of this work is her parents’ backgrounds as Korean Christians, who immigrated to San Jose, California from South Korea with Kyungmi and her family when the artist was 19. Shin is interested in the ways Christianity was used as a tool of colonization, spread across parts of the Global South to claim territory and sanction the theft of peoples’ land and livelihoods, as well as the suppression and erasure of their epistemologies.
With a focus on opacity, Shin intervenes in layers of paintings and prints to reveal the cultural confluences and exchanges that occurred as a result of imperialism.
