In 2013, Shin Gallery was inaugurated onto Orchard Street, a bustling hub of commerce and culture tucked into the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Since these early beginnings, the gallery’s ambition has been to display boundary-pushing, innovative exhibitions by bolstering rediscovered, marginalized, and enterprising young artists often neglected by the annals of mainstream art history. Simultaneously, Shin Gallery has deeply valued the mode of art presentation, appreciating how artworks exceed the threshold of the painting’s frame or a sculpture’s edges. For instance, in 2015 the gallery was converted into a seedy, neon-lit massage parlor, dovetailing the corporeal photography of Viennese Actionist artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler with Nobuyoshi Araki’s monochrome erotic works. Shin Gallery has also enthusiastically patronized artists who uphold a singular vision, exemplified by the gallery’s providing studio spaces for artists like the “Godfather of Street Art”, Richard Hambleton. What unifies these assorted threads is Shin Gallery’s unwavering interest in celebrating art as a public utility for the community, rather than as a rarefied and lofty luxury circumscribed to a select elite. As Shin Gallery continues to grow into the future, we will persevere in celebrating diverse narratives and inventive installations, bringing the community together to revere in a common love of art.

2022 marks Shin Gallery’s 10-year anniversary. In honor of this critical milestone, we have decided to put on a special show. In keeping with the gallery’s ethos, this exhibition will showcase the work of both overlooked and renowned artists. Evoking a museum showcase, the exhibition will utilize the three gallery rooms to proffer a wide-ranging narrative that juxtaposes renowned and rare works with those of emerging contemporary voices. The first room will traverse drawings from both Old Masters and Modernist bastions. The second room will recreate the apartment of gallery owner and art collector Hong Gyu Shin, displaying intimate works from his variegated personal collection. The third and final room, made up in salon-style, will be adorned by both figurative and abstract paintings.

The first room focuses on drawing, traversing a multitude of movements from Rococo to Abstract Expressionism. Moving through centuries of art history, this room features François Boucher's decorative scenographies, pairing these 18th century pastoral works with expressionist pieces. Trekking through almost three centuries, this room will also feature drawings by Marisol Escobar, Ernest Mancoba, François Boucher, Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, and Vilhelm Hammershøi. Spearheading a nonstandard approach to curatorship, these works thoroughly probe the medium of drawing by unspooling varied, unconventional approaches while mending them into dialogue.

The second gallery room is highly intimate, offering viewers a window into Shin’s personal collection, decades in the making. Displayed alongside scattered artifacts and household furniture pieces, the space is bustling with domestic items, including personal notes and letters from meetings, placed beside heirlooms and vestiges from travels abroad. These relics invite viewers to contemplate and navigate the gallery space as a living, breathing vehicle where one’s cultural context and material surroundings motivate them to transcend any threshold between that which is deemed art and that which is putatively refuse. This room collapses such distinctions, as evinced by Willem de Kooning’s painted wooden toilet seat, a remarkable 1954 piece that features a distinctive splatter painting contribution from De Kooning’s contemporary, Jackson Pollock. Framed by antique lamps and wooden chairs plucked from Shin’s home, works by Chris Burden, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, David Drake, John Graham, and Tracey Emin trace Shin Gallery’s decade-long development. Moving through this space, the viewer is able to encounter art as ineliminably rooted in its social and historical context.

The third and final room of the exhibition is inspired by salon installation, a tradition that began with the Louvre Palace in 1670 and consists of artworks that fill a gallery wall from floor to ceiling with an amalgamation of styles and subject matter. In keeping with this tradition, Shin Gallery presents an eclectic mix of paintings. On the one hand, we have the graffiti-inspired South Bronx native Kool Koor’s contribution, which features curling white letters feverishly tagged on several layers of kaleidoscopic paint—reminiscent of a cut-out from Harlem’s Freedom Tunnel. Koor’s piece well complements Richard Hambleton’s splatter-strewn ghostly silhouette, an outline of an anonymous figure crazed within a marble-like background. On the other hand, we have a portrait by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, which features his characteristic tonal play—a beclouded and shadowed face softly emerges from a dark amber background. Mending and mediating the painterly and the haptic with representational indices is Elaine de Kooning’s contribution—in this piece, we can make out the outline of a blue-and-white face, painted in thick streaks. Harmonizing these various works, this salon room presents a heterogeneous tableau.

As evinced by the medley of traditions and media, this exhibition celebrating one decade of Shin Gallery is unlike anything we have previously displayed. This show reflects a diverse approach to both the seminal figures of art history and those figures who have been historically occluded. We hope that over the past 10 years our visitors have enjoyed our exhibitions and look forward to bestowing many more to an ever-expanding audience. Our passion for sharing art with the wider community is what motivates our team and Shin Gallery would not be possible without your continued support. We ardently look forward to welcoming you into the gallery and sharing our new exhibition with you.

To everyone who has made the success of this gallery possible, thank you.

Warm regards,
Shin Gallery


List of Artists:

Tracey Emin, Egon Schiele, May Ray, Jackson Pollock, Congo, Ernest Mancoba, Joseph Stella, Honoré Daumier, Eugene Delacroix, Gustav Klimt, Joan Collette, Alan Sonfist, John D. Graham,, Marisol Escobar, Elaine de Kooning, Gopal Ghose, François Boucher, Henry Moore, Bill Traylor, James Castle, Andy Warhol, Charles Joseph Biederman, Arshile Gorky, Else Alfelt, Willem de Kooning, Claes Oldenburg, Ted Stamm, Stephen Antonakos, Man Ray, Chris Burden, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Bellmer, Lucio Fontana, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Alfredo Volpi, Elisa Martins da Silveira, J.F. Willumsen, Kunie Sugiura, Carmelo de Arzadun, Amir Nave, Roberto Matta, Ejler Bille, Svavar Gudnason, Beauford Delaney, Mira Schendel, Paul Jenkins, Carla Prina, Frank Robbins, Purvis Young, James McNeill Whistler, Joshua Johnson, Thomas Eakins, Peyton Freidman, Andreas Emenius, J.F. Willumsen, Fedor Encke, Stan 153, Choong Sup Lim, Harold Ancart, Kool Koor, Alex Katz, Hyon Gyon, Anna Maria Maiolino, Keunmin Lee, Robert Indiana, Richard Hambleton, and Lygia Clark.