Meekyoung Shin [Paperback]

Shins work, rooted in cross-cultural translation and uncanny replication, examines how objects travel, beget meaning, and resist easy classification as they move between continents, centuries, and museums.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 artifacts and canonical works of art, from Asian porcelain vases to Greek and Roman sculptures, translating between continents, cultures, and centuries in the process.In this new monograph on the artist, Jonathan Watkins sets the scene for Shins solo exhibition at the Korean Cultural Center UK in London in late autumn 2013, a stones throw from Nelsons Column and the Fourth Plinth commission of Trafalgar Square. Context is essential to Shins practice, and indeed, to her identity. As she asserts: I often identify myself as someone on the border between cultures. Watkins eloquently introduces Shins major bodies of work whilst capturing the cultural complexity, exquisite craftsmanship, conceptual elegance, and natural wit embodied within them. n essay by Ben Tufnell explores the cultural and historical references in Shins work over the past fifteen years. Taking Shins 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 artists 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 fully Roman it inhabits a cultural limbo space. Tufnell explains, Shins works are not simply replicas or reproductions but strange twins, lS1