Exhibitions
Auckland
Jeena Shin Time-delay
Two Rooms, 11 March–14 April AMY STEWART
On the afternoon that I visited Jeena Shin’s Time-delay in the upper of Two Rooms’ two rooms, the bright afternoon sun was making an installation of the nine canvases. In a remarkable bit of visual happenstance, crisp white light streamed through the skylights, covering the room in illuminated shards. This sunlit cameo mirroring Shin’s forms was random, and it served as an excellent primer for a show about time and layered reality.
The nine canvases—all titled Time-delay plus a number—form two series, one numbered in Hindu-Arabic numerals and the other Roman. The series share the same protagonist in the tessellated triangular form that Shin has riffed on since 2004, based on a piece of paper folded once, twice, infinitely. The palette of one series is crystalline, like cut glass, while the other casts more pronounced shadows in rubbery greys. Close inspection reveals the most satisfyingly taut lines, razor edges slicing through the suggestion of time and space.
The subtler and more specific distinction between the figures in each group is unpicked in Janine Randerson’s excellent room-sheet essay. She explains that in one series ‘each form is a shadow memory of the one placed ahead’, while the second series produces ‘translucent echoes’. A-ha, I think, looking again, as if this formal password were all that was needed to unlock these works. I see: the Leibnizian monad is on a course of infinite fragmentation ever-outward from its indivisible origin. But it was Randerson’s use of the term holding pattern that really set me off.
In many of Shin’s more all-over works and murals—in Karangahape Road’s Peach Pit, the Aotea Centre, Fractus (2011) at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, for example—the triangular shapes intersect and collide, creating an in-canvas dynamism that sounds like shattering glass. But the sequential repetitions on display in this room, which I cannot but process left-to-right and top-to-bottom, read like instructions, steps toward some kind of finishing. I am reminded of Roman Opałka and his journey forward through time, each moment diligently journaled on canvas. This holding pattern feels to me like a hand-holding guide, like steps through a recipe, or like watching a YouTube tutorial on how to fold an origami star. Following Randerson’s observation about the internal time collapse we have endured collectively since 2020, what I had read as jagged glass-shattering upon first entering the room now felt like the soothing satisfaction of smoothing the edge of a just-folded piece of paper.
Of course there are much headier folds here, namely Deleuze’s, from whose texts Shin gleans inspiration. I refreshed my memory with a few chapters in preparation for coming to visit this show; prior to that revision the distance measured in time-slices between me and when I last encountered Deleuze was substantial indeed. But as a measure of Shin’s success, these works (together with Randerson’s essay) held me quietly in a mental space much larger than the
