Jin Shiu

Temporary Landing

I first came across Jin Shiu's work at a residency in South Korea in 2007. We had been invited to spend three months working in studios in the centre of at an old market place south of Seoul, developing projects responding to a space and a community that was working under threat of redevelopment. Shiu's project involved recording a number of the local stallholders singing their favourite workday songs, a simple gesture but one which resulted in a collection of haunting yet celebratory portraits of the individuals from the market. Even with my limited knowledge of Korean language and culture, the many emotions within the songs resonated strongly amongst the surrounding noises of people going on with their daily business in the shops.

The sound of each of these songs seemed to shift gently backwards and forwards between joyfulness and melancholy, and movements along similarly fine lines seem to happen in a lot of his works, whether it be a narrow and meandering path between comedy or tragedy, or as with a lot of the works in this show, pieces that are situated somewhere between objecthood and performative act -- never wholly one or the other, the pieces tend to somehow imbue an action and a narrative whilst still being more sculpture than artefact. They are tensions that sit quietly beneath the surface, objects that begin to tell one story and yet hint at another.

- Nick Spratt