Installation view of 《Becoming Stone: From the Remains》 © AOD Museum
AOD (Art of Dalim) Museum,
a cultural and artistic space operated by the Dalim Cultural Foundation,
presents 《Becoming Stone: From the Remains》, a solo exhibition by Meekyoung Shin, through February
28, 2027.
Meekyoung Shin has, since the late 1990s, presented a body of work
that translates historical artifacts and cultural iconography through diverse
materials, moving between East and West, antiquity and the contemporary.
Alongside her use of soap as an everyday artistic material, she has worked
across various media, including ceramics, inviting us to consider artworks not
as fixed objects but as entities in a state of constant transformation.
Exploring the threshold between disappearance and existence, and
approaching artworks as events that unfold continuously, Shin uses the language
of art to prompt us to reconsider the conceptual conditions through which we
perceive and name things.
Installation view of 《Becoming Stone: From the Remains》 © AOD Museum
At AOD Museum, Meekyoung Shin presents her first exhibition in
Korea to introduce her ‘Megalith’ series, bringing this body of work to the
forefront for the first time.
The series, which forms the centerpiece of the exhibition,
comprises ceramic sculptures resembling ancient relics or mineral masses,
stacked into monumental rock-like structures. Taking clay as her material
starting point, Shin creates a space where the forms of archaeological
artifacts intersect with the language of contemporary sculpture. The works in
this exhibition revisit questions of materiality, time, and how we perceive
objects.
Shin’s ‘Megalith’ series cannot be readily confined to the state
or identity of any single material. Although rooted in clay and shaped by the
firing process of ceramics, the works extend beyond these origins. They take on
the appearance of rocks while acquiring meanings that go beyond their physical
form.
This liminal state becomes possible through Shin’s willingness to
embrace the chance occurrences and transformations she encounters at the outset
and throughout the making process.
Her practice centers on responding to the formal possibilities
opened up by material events that have already taken place, then exploring
further possibilities through a chain of subsequent developments. At its core
is the transformation of the remnants left by one event into the starting point
for the next.
Installation view of 《Becoming Stone: From the Remains》 © AOD Museum
Alongside the ‘Megalith’ series, the exhibition also presents ‘Unknown
Painting’, a new series created in 2026. The two series converge in their
approach to translating the potential inherent in an encounter with an event or
material state into a different language of art.
Although ‘Unknown Painting’ takes on the form of painting as it is
displayed on the wall, the process of applying and layering Jesmonite and metal
powder across the surface reveals forms and traces generated by the materials
themselves, rather than reproducing any specific image. The surface is filled
through this ongoing process of accumulation and transformation.
Through these interconnected bodies of work, Shin
treats the end of one event as the beginning of another, moving materials into
different states through a continuous sequence of events and inscribing
sculpture with questions about how these states should be named. In Shin’s
practice, “becoming” means transitioning into another name and form while
retaining the traces of what came before.
