Shen Xin - Brine Lake (A New Body)

Shen Xin: Brine Lake (A New Body)

November 17, 2021–July 3, 2022

For their first US museum solo exhibition, Twin Cities–based artist Shen Xin (b. 1990, Chengdu) debuts a new video and sound installation following its 2021 premiere at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. Brine Lake (A New Body) (2020) meditates on the intersections between extractive economies, migrant populations, statelessness, and transnational identities.

Set against a backdrop of a fictional iodine recycling factory, the work follows both human and nonhuman protagonists as they converse in multiple languages—Korean, Japanese, and Russian—comingling topics such as ecology, technology, economy, and personal memory. Projected onto five large-scale screens suspended at intervals throughout the gallery space, Brine Lake encourages visitors to become active participants as they move between the work’s overlapping episodes.

Curated by Victoria Sung, associate curator, Visual Arts; and William Hernández Luege, curatorial assistant, Visual Arts.

About the artist
Shen Xin (b. 1990, Chengdu) graduated from Slade School of Fine Art with an MFA in Fine Art Media in 2014. Through films, video installations, and performative events, Shen’s practice examines and fabricates techniques and effects of how emotion, judgment, and ethics circulate through individual and collective subjects. By focusing on interpersonal complexities and political narratives, their films often aim to generate reflexiveness to dismantle dominant power structures.

Shen’s recent solo presentations include Double Feature, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2019); Synthetic Types, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2019); Methods of Inhabiting, K11 Shanghai (2018); half-sung, half spoken, Serpentine Pavilion, London (2017); among others. Their upcoming exhibition at the Swiss Institute, New York, opens in May 2022. Recent group shows include Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning, Gwangju Biennale (2021); An Impulse to Turn, Inside-Out Museum, Beijing (2020); Topologies of the Real, Techne Triennial, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing (2020); Sigg Prize 2019, M+, Hong Kong (2019); FREE PRISM, Video Wave, OCT Boxes Art Museum, Guangzhou (2019); NEITHER BLACK/ RED/ YELLOW/ NOR WOMAN, Times Art Center, Berlin (2019); LANDSCAPE WITH BEAR, De Appel, Amsterdam (2019); Remapping Reality, OCAT, Shanghai (2019); Songs for Sabotage, the New Museum Triennial, New York (2018); among others. Shen was awarded the BALTIC Artists’ Award in 2017, and was shortlisted for the Sigg Prize and BMW Art Journal in 2019.