Haseo Shin Hyekyung South Korean, b. 1961

Haseo Shin Hyekyung (b.1961) studied painting and photography in France and received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Photography at the University of Paris 8, where she earned her Doctorate in Visual Arts (Photography) in 1995. Her dissertation examined artists working on the boundary between contemporary photography and visual art. Shin’s practice carries a documentary quality, recording her life and personal experiences. Drawing from her experience as curator at the Art Sonje Center in Gyeongju and as a professor of Industrial Arts at Suwon University, she has explored the relationship between form and meaning through works ranging from Polaroid experiments to her “Body,” “Enlargement,” and “Garden” series, delving into themes of the human body, space, and memory. Today, her work has evolved into abstract paintings where blurred contours of color, line, and sign overlap or drift, translating everyday landscapes, emotions, and musical impressions into sensuous brushstrokes and richly layered imagery. 

Shin gathers fragments of daily life, invisible vibrations, and quantum possibilities to construct an alternative ecology of sensation and memory. What she calls the “singularity” is both a threshold where existing orders collapse and a transformative point where new possibilities emerge. This notion resonates with the hallucinatory errors of AI language, in which machines mix fact and fiction to imaginatively fill the gaps of reality. Similarly, her paintings transcend the despair of the unknown to generate new patterns and narratives. Layering image, data, and memory, her canvases unfold into multidimensional landscapes that, through processes of immersion and challenge, evoke a sense of freedom and expansiveness in the viewer.