Aspen Art Museum

Heji Shin’s America: Part One presents newly commissioned photographs by Heji Shin (b. 1976, Seoul, Korea), an artist based between New York City and the Catskill Mountains. Over the past decade, Shin has generated indelible images that refract and consequently shape visual culture. Previous series include images of crowning babies, screeching roosters, infamous popstars and jocular pigs. Vitality assumes unexpected forms within this exhibition, which features photographs of rockets in mid-air and waves crashing on rocky shoreline.

In the summer of 2024, Shin embedded herself within a community of photographers of rocket launches in and around Cape Canaveral, Florida, and gained access to launches and test sites as a member of NASA’s press corps. Eight resulting scenes of vertical acceleration hang on the walls of the gallery. The central subject, unmoored from hard ground, oscillates between a heroic vehicle of triumph and a toy.

Within an adjacent gallery are photographs of waves taken on the eve of a hurricane. These turbulent oceanscapes reference the work of American painter Winslow Homer, an artist renowned for his sensitivity toward humanity’s station within natural phenomena. In the late 1890s, Homer de-populated his coastal scenes, emphasizing the energy, speed, and spiritual power of waves. Shin’s personless photographs honor this trajectory within Homer’s practice and channel the ocean’s unrelenting might.

The axial logic of the exhibition presents a nation seen through its periphery, with disparate atmospheric pressures. These are elemental images in which air and fire, sea and earth command attention. Gravity, too, presides over Shin’s scenes of surges and escape.

About Heji Shin

Heji Shin (b. 1976 in Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as at KAT_A, Bad Honnef, Germany (2022), Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2021), and Kunsthalle Zürich (2018). Recent group exhibitions include No Dandy, No Fun, Kunsthalle Bern (2020), Time Is Thirsty, Kunsthalle Wien (2019), and the Whitney Biennial, New York (2019). Her photographs have appeared in publications and periodicals worldwide.