Meekyoung Shin

London and Seoul-based Korean artist Meekyoung Shin (b.1967) is internationally renowned for her sculptures that probe the mis- and re-translations that often emerge when objects of distinct cultural and historical specificity are dislocated from their original context. Made from soap, her works replicate artefacts and canonical works of art, from Asian porcelain vases to Greek and Roman sculptures, translating between continents, cultures and centuries in the process. Meekyoung Shin was born in South Korea and completed her BFA and MFA at Seoul National University. In 1995, she moved to London to obtain her MFA at the Slade School of Art, University College London, and has since held solo exhibitions internationally including at Haunch of Venison, London (2010) and the Korean Cultural Centre UK, London (2013). She has participated in numerous group shows including at the Museum of Art and Design, New York, and the 2013 Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan. Her works are found in collections all over the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Shin was nominated for the Korea Artist Prize 2013. In this new monograph on the artist, Jonathan Watkins sets the scene for Shin’s solo exhibition at the Korean Cultural Centre UK in London in late autumn 2013, a stone’s throw from Nelson’s Column and the‘Fourth Plinth’ commission of Trafalgar Square. Context is essential to Shin’s practice, and indeed, to her identity. As she asserts: ‘I often identify myself as someone on the border between cultures’. Watkins eloquently introduces Shin’s major bodies of work whilst capturing the cultural complexity, exquisite craftsmanship, conceptual elegance and natural wit embodied within them. An essay by Ben Tufnell explores the cultural and historical references in Shin’s work over the past fifteen years. Taking Shin’s solo exhibition at Haunch of Venison in London in 2011 as his point of departure, he opens up questions of anthropology and museology, of what is exhibited where and when, by and for whom. His incisive analysis of Crouching Aphrodite (2002)– a life-size sculpture of the artist’s own body in the pose of the classical Venus of Vienne from the Louvre – raises issues of Eastern and Western culture, of originality and copying: ‘Being neither fully Asian nor...