On the occasion of Heji Shin’s America: Part One at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, USA, writer Robert Frost engaged the photographer in a discussion about moral orthodoxy, why she doesn’t want to accommodate people’s ideological obsessions, and how having a subject that doesn’t submit is transcendental.

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When you emailed last night I was almost done reading Hans-Christian Dany and Valérie Knoll’s book No Dandy, No Fun which has your photo Mamma 1 sitting opposite a kind of plea for brashness: “Trying to conform to other people’s expectations would be considered unfashionable. Instead of always trying to do what’s considered right, everyone would make an effort to surprise others, as a way of avoiding the boredom of predictability.” This morning I thought it was a bit of good luck. Unpredictability kind of tracks with the photographs in Aspen.

I think the portrait of my mother is amusing. It’s an accurate depiction of her subversive character of a misfit. I don’t feel this in my Aspen show. It is more a return to elemental ideas. More epic and abstract. The surprise lies in the departure from the topics of my other works. The topic of nature in the waves and rocks, and the opposing/complimentary sky cult images of the rockets.

The departure from Kanyes and porn stars playing policemen. Do you think people haven’t got the stomach for these kinds of things at the moment?

It was simply how I felt at that moment. I don’t normally think about these things. Sounds very cliche, but that’s more an internal process, more an intuitive way to choose how you want to express the ideas. Especially when it comes to the idea of America, people have ideological obsessions that I didn’t want to accommodate.

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Not wanting to cater to fixed ideas has an echo. Yesterday, I read Benoît Lamy de la Chapelle say your work in Blood Bath isn’t the banner for any cause.

Blood Bath was shot in Ukraine with people pretending to be soldiers, before the actual war started, the impulse to go there and photograph those people was partly journalistic, I was curious to meet the people who were doing that and on a more intuitive level I knew they were in touch with something more archetypical, maybe a sense that there’s perpetual violence everywhere and very harsh transformational events in the world and we are too left-brained and numb to feel the intensity of what is happening.

For sure.

People rationalise things to justify them or deal with them.

What made you cut the combat images with another series?

I think I was interested in the fact that in photography it is possible to create a reality or make it look like a documentary although it was staged. I was aware that the conflict between Russia and Ukraine had been going for over 6 years prior to Putin invading but at the time of shooting I never thought things would escalate to this extent. The photos probably deal with deception, and for that reason maybe they are a little bit of a psyop. The other series shown alongside the war images was shot originally as a commercial commission for Supreme. It’s a monkey playing with a camera, a stand-in for the photographer, maybe it was a reminder of the people and process through which images are fabricated.

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I’ve just received your portrait by Richard Kern.

I love Richard Kern.

Do you have a lot in common?

I am friends with Richard, so I can say we have a lot in common. We have the same interests and agree on lot of things. I don’t know if it shows in our work though. We both didn’t originally start with fashion photography, but do commissioned fashion work. I guess we both did pornography to some extent as well.

I heard him say he’s toning down his creepiness. It reminded me of what you’re saying, or what I’ve read people say about Heji Shin’s America, about provocation. It obviously has something to do with the departure from your other topics. Yet the photographs almost have a place in the hackneyed image genre, where symbolism becomes invisible through its normality. Prince’s Cowboys comes to mind. Have you thought about the work in this context?

Originally I was drawn to the subjects by a sincere interest, I wanted to photograph giant rockets and landscapes in the tradition of Ansel Adams which I was looking at a lot. The subject matter itself is transcendent and larger than life, which makes photographing it from the perspective of a single human being with a camera a humbling experience and the images themselves end up looking very recognizable almost as an archetype because there aren’t a million ways to photograph a rocket if you actually want to see the rocket. The camera has to be in a protective cage a few miles away, you have to use a very long lens, those are the conditions that make the “genre” instantly recognizable. But the rocket photos in the exhibition, to me at least, are a little bit like Monet painting the Rouen cathedral at different times of the day. There’s subtle shifts in light, atmospheric conditions, cloud reflections, glare, etc., and I think the work becomes about human perception and nature.

{laughs} I just noticed that I compared myself to Monet… that’s cool.

And Winslow Homer! What’s it like having a subject that doesn’t submit?

Photographing landscapes was an introspective process, as you are in a receiving mode. There’s something transcendental in photographing a subject that doesn’t easily submit to the lens. It’s different from transgression, where breaking boundaries often involves defiance. Kind of a peaceful experience.

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This interview is published on the occasion of Heji Shin’s America: Part One at Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, United States, 2024-25, curated by Daniel Merritt, Director of Curatorial Affairs.

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.

Robert Frost is a writer, editor of émergent, and host of Divine Transportations.

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