Written in Soap: A Plinth Project (2012- ongoing) is an international public art project by the London-based Korean artist, Meekyoung Shin. The artwork re-creates in soap the original equestrian statue of the Duke of Cumberland that sat on a plinth in the square from 1770 and removed in 1868 for politically motivated reasons. Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, was the third and favourite son of King George II, and the Duke became a war hero at the young age of twenty-five when he prevented Bonnie Prince Charles’s and the Jacobites’ attempt to depose the House of Hanover at the historic Battle of Culloden on 16th April 1746. The victory was met with jubilant celebrations in England but the military hero soon earned the nickname, the ‘Butcher,’ for his unscrupulous orders of executions and plunder. Borrowing from Sanford Levinson’s study on the tradition of public monument building in changing societies, Written in Stone (1998), Written in Soap: A Plinth Project reconsiders the monument as a site of historical and cultural negotiations, and the mutable meanings we attach to them. The project had made use of the Cavendish Square plinth for the first time in 144 years. During the course of its installation spanning across a year, the sculpture has eroded, affected by rain and snow, challenging notions of permanence we attach to such monuments and consequently, to historical narratives.

The international expansion of the project to Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art followed by the successful opening at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in July earlier this year adds a new and exciting dimension to the project. It encapsulates Meekyoung Shin’s ongoing concern with the notion of ‘translation,’ a process that questions the understanding of objects of historical and cultural specificity when they are re-or dislocated temporally and geographically. As the new audience in Taiwan and beyond participate in the ‘translation’ of this sculpture, we can ask: what does it mean when a statue that was originally erected to celebrate a one-time war hero over a hundred years ago as a personal tribute by an individual, brought down a century later, is now resurrected as a work of art by an emigrant artist in the twenty-first century in a museum dedicated to contemporary art five thousand miles away?  As the project continues to expand, each leg of the project can be accessed live by the public, who become witnesses of the sculpture’s transformation, through the project’s website www.writteninsoap.com. The appropriation of Written in Soap: A Plinth Project by each new territory – on- and offline, present and future – challenges the assumption that monuments are static in both place and time. Shin’s deconstruction of the cultural strategies of commemoration is a compelling reminder of the complex sets of codes at work, determined by the traditions and conventions of a given society or culture, upon which our perception and engagement so heavily rely.
- By Kyung An

About the artist 
Meekyoung Shin was born in South Korea and completed her BFA and MFA at Seoul National University. In 1995, she moved to London to obtain her MFA at the Slade School of Art, University College London, and has since held solo exhibitions internationally including Haunch of Venison, London (2010) and the Korean Cultural Centre UK, London (2013). She has participated in numerous group shows and her works are found in collections all over the world, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the National Museum Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Most recently, Shin was nominated for the Korean Artist Prize 2013.

Shin is renowned for her expansive Translation Series (2004-onging) that probe the mis- and re-translations that often emerge when objects of certain cultural specificity are dislocated. Her most iconic public art project has been the Toilet Series, installations of sculptures created out of soap in public bathrooms for use, which are subsequently exhibited in the gallery context in their eroded form. In 2012, Shin conceived of Written in Soap: A Plinth Project in London, an on-going public sculpture project which has since expanded to Seoul and Taipei.