The sea mesmerizes people. Pain, despair, bliss, terror, nirvana, peace—one discovers in the sea all corresponding aesthetical counterparts. Many artists, who have all too often attempted to express the sea in a painterly manner or simply capture it as a photographic image, exemplify the diversity of this encounter with the sea. The depth of the sea, which defies precise mathematical measurement, is filled with mystical tales of countless organisms that inhabit the oceanic kingdom. There is no beginning or an end to an imagination of the mythological that the sea evokes. This is how the sea is a metaphor and an actuality that exists in the center of a metonymic chain.

Until now, the sea, which many male artists depicted, has been predominantly about imperiousness, reverence, gallantry, and vastness.  In Shin Mihe’s exhibit The Sea, E/SCAPE, the viewers will encounter a very special existential dimension of the sea.

The June exhibit, The Sea, E/SCAPE, at Trunk Gallery and aA Museum will show the results of Shin Mihe’s long journey, in search of E/SCAPE from 2003 to 2006. Here, there is the sea, and then there are her found bottles that resemble the sea. If the sea in its endless transformations manifests the limitation of its representation and at the same time opens up its possibilities to infinity, this paradoxical nature of the sea has arrived at a very appealing state of tranquility in Shin Mihe’s seascape. The images of the sea, in their endlessly transparent blue, red, and purple colors and deepening to blue/black and blue/ green, trigger the imagination of the viewers, revealing the tension between what has been confined to the frame and the scape that goes beyond it; the existential form of this e/scape is beautifully revealed by the artist.

The viewers will experience the overlapping of the captured and the vanished as well as countless layers of silence and whisper in Shin Mihe’s sea pictures. With the horizon gone, the sea becomes the plateau of color in its serenity. In the innermost depth of the sea where thousands and thousands of strands of light and darkness, and hours are buried, the spirit-words-scale are slowly rising. Now in the very meditative act of seeing, the viewer with eyes closed will become imbued with old stories that endlessly slide down the closed eyelid. Countless personal histories will form a cradle in which time and space the stories occupied will be unleashed. Allow yourself to be cradled in the ever-so-deep, and ever-so-lucid bosom of the artist’s personal histories. Why not include your own stories there?

Kim Young-Ok
(Image Critic and Researcher, Ewha womans University / Korean Women’s Research Institute)
Translation by Choi, In Young

Opening Date :  JUNE 07(Tue), 2011 / pm 6:00 Trunk Gallery
Artist Talk  :  JUNE 15(Wed), 2011 / pm 7:00 Trunk Gallery