Min Shin

2025

Min’s work explores the connection between food and people, emphasizing the act of sitting and eating together as a powerful form of cultural and emotional exchange. At its core is the concept of Sikgu (식구, “food-mouth”) which refers to those we eat with, and by extension, those we live and share our lives with. In her practice, shared meals become both social rituals and artistic expressions. These gatherings are not just about eating but about digesting memories, stories, and identities. They become a way of transmitting love, respect, and knowledge through sensory experience. Having grown up in one place but no longer living there, Min experiences a quiet but profound sense of displacement, a subtle shift that has deeply shaped her relationship to food and belonging. This feeling of being in between has led her to step away from familiar culinary traditions and instead cook from the margins, using what she finds in the space of transition. She calls these materials “in between ingredients.” A Korean pickle recipe passed down from her grandmother is reimagined with wild garlic foraged in the Dutch countryside and served with bread. Mung bean jelly, usually sliced and seasoned in the Korean style, becomes part of a Dutch-style cheese platter. These combinations reflect a playful and thoughtful merging of inherited memory and local context. The lived experiences and personal narratives that Min carries with her continually resurface in her work. They form the backbone of a practice that is always evolving, always responding to the meeting points of culture, place, and identity. Her work becomes a sensory archive shaped by taste, memory, and imagination. For her graduation presentation, Min Shin will set a low floor-style table, an open invitation to sit together and reflect on what it means to share a meal. Alongside it, she will serve dishes made with in between ingredients drawn from the spaces where cultures, memories, and geographies meet. Through this gathering, she invites us to engage fully, not only with the food but with each other. To taste, to listen, to reflect. To consider what Sikgu means to her, and what it might come to mean for us.

Artist statement
Min Shin explores the meaning of being together around the tables we share. Her practice asks: What do we eat, how do we eat it, where, with whom, and why? Rooted in everyday gestures—memories, recipes, habits, and actions—her work unpacks the act of eating not just as consumption, but as a form of storytelling, connection, and care. By revisiting the food we once shared, in the places we inhabit, Shin invites us to reflect on the subtle rituals that shape belonging. Through food, narrative, and encounter, she creates intimate spaces where personal and collective histories come to the surface.

This page was last updated on July 8, 2025