GALLERY SU: presents Fay Shin’s solo exhibition Air within Us from Thursday, July 2 to Sunday, July 26, 2020. Shin has continued delivering the physical sensations experienced in the external environment through her work. The new and older paintings and installations use different media and techniques to expand the images into a space of various textures.
The exhibition’s title, Air within Us, derives from Fay Shin’s imagination about the air flowing through one’s body and across each other, which eventually extends into ‘us’. Hanging in the gallery’s first and second floor comprehend the artist’s working method using spray and watercolor on various fabrics - including canvas, linen, cotton, denim, silk, man suit, etc – that provide heptic experiences. The man suit and denim, which are sturdy and durable, reminding of labor, city, and masculinity, are assembled with silk, which is soft and delicate. Drawing shapes out of fabrics whose dissimilarities in character creates a tension on the surface, Shin adds painterly gestures with spray and watercolor. The artist’s incisive evocation of such tension provokes the viewer of air currents.
Traversing through the paintings, Front and back side of the planet: motility, ion, wave (2019) pieces the jeans with dyed silk like arms and legs. While exploring a point where visual and tactile modalities meet, the artist intends the engagement of the viewer in the long flowing surface across the space. 0 Light Year (2020) displays traditional white fabrics, from hand-woven cotton, silk to 50-year-old calico fabric from the artist’s mother, using a structural support. After adding patterns by sewing and gluing the fabrics, Shin has dressed immaterial elements of light and temperature with two different colors of bulbs.
These paintings within the space allows the viewer to explore the possibilities themselves, followed by unexpected encounter with Weather Painting (2016) on the third floor, which marks the beginning of Shin’s artistic experiments. The canvases manifest the traces of how she feels and reacts to the change of the weather with the use of spray paints. The colors and particles on different shapes of canvases embody the moments of impromptu and fluidity. Shin’s paintings create a new dimension, a sensory and mutual space that flows away from various materials and traces accumulated between the artist and the atmosphere. Through the lively space that emerges unexpectedly from the painting and beyond, one will encounter the extraordinary moments of fulfilling the empty space within oneself.
