Interview | Daegu and Seoul-based Artist Shin Junmin

Shin Junmin (b. 1985) is a South Korean painter based between Daegu and Seoul. His practice explores light and its traces in space, investigating how natural and artificial light shape perception and transform everyday landscapes. Moving between figuration and abstraction, he examines the material and immaterial qualities of light through a distinctive painterly language. A recurring motif in his work is “white-out,” which extends beyond the canvas to engage space, the viewer’s gaze, and the body, capturing the sensory and emotional presence of light.

Shin has held thirteen solo exhibitions, including Penumbra at Pageroom8 (2026), LightWalk at Daegu Arts Center (2025), White Out at Pipe Gallery (2024), and New Light at Boan1942 (2022).

Flood Lighting, 2024, Oil on canvas, 150 x 200 cm

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

As a walker in everyday life, I have explored unfamiliar landscapes and specific places in Daegu—including Dalseong Park Zoo, the Civic Stadium baseball field, and the Dalseong Wetlands—as the subjects of my paintings. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 marked a significant turning point in my practice. Daegu became a city filled with an uncanny silence, almost like a ghost town, and I began to see light from an entirely different perspective. I was particularly captivated by the white light shimmering across the waves of the West Sea. Since then, I have sought out landscapes imbued with light, pursuing painterly experiments that explore the diverse manifestations of both natural and artificial light.

Bloom, 2026, Oil on canvas, 150 x 150 cm

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

My work explores light itself, as well as the traces it leaves in space and human perception through painting. For example, light that illuminates its subject—such as streetlights or stadium floodlights—is so intense when encountered directly that it creates a dazzling white world in which visibility is momentarily erased. In contrast, the objects illuminated by that light often linger as afterimages, shaped by the emotions and circumstances of the moment.

Through my paintings, I seek to capture the shifting forms of artificial light, which has no fixed shape and changes according to space and circumstance. Moving between the material and immaterial, the visible and the invisible, I explore new painterly possibilities at the boundary between figuration and abstraction.

Flight, 2026, Oil on canvas, 117 x 91 cm

Your work often explores the interplay of natural and artificial light. How do you approach capturing these experiences into your art?

Natural light is something I experience directly within the landscape. In my paintings, I seek to evoke not only the light itself, but also the memories and sensations associated with it—the wind, the temperature, and even the sounds of a particular moment. Artificial light, on the other hand, reveals a different kind of experience. Looking at it closely, I realized that it is not simply white, but composed of subtle RGB tones that spread and overlap. To translate this experience into painting, I work with oil paint and generous amounts of solvent, building up multiple layers of color to create a wide range of whites rather than a single white. Through this process, I aim to convey the radiant presence and sensory qualities of light.

Although natural and artificial light possess distinct characteristics, I am interested in how the experiences they create can ultimately converge into a single painterly resonance.

Light Forest, 2025, Oil on canvas, 230 x 300 cm

What is your creative process like? Do you follow a routine or work spontaneously?

Although I work within a consistent routine, I value spontaneity and chance throughout the process. I move quickly across the entire canvas with energetic brushstrokes, building impressions of light through layers of points, lines, and whites. As I repeatedly apply and remove paint, the pigments overlap, dissolve, and flow across the surface. In this process, forms disappear and re-emerge, while intentional marks intertwine with accidental ones to generate new images.

For me, painting is not about completing a single image, but about allowing bodily movement, memory, and sensation to continuously transform and accumulate on the canvas. I embrace the outcomes created through the interplay of intention and chance, and allow them to guide the work as it evolves.

Spotlight, 2025, Oil on canvas, 230 x 724 cm

How do you approach exhibiting your work? What are your goals when showing your art in public spaces?

When planning an exhibition, my approach varies according to the character of the exhibition space. At times I develop the exhibition around a site-specific theme, while at other times I focus on personal experiences and narratives. These considerations shape the scale, content, format, and installation of the works, allowing the exhibition to unfold as a cohesive whole.

Encountering light naturally draws us into reflection, awakening memories and personal associations. I hope that the various forms of light and landscapes I capture will resonate with viewers, becoming another light and landscape shaped by their own memories and experiences. I also hope that viewers will look at artificial light with fresh eyes. Compared to natural light, it has had fewer opportunities to become an object of contemplation. Through my work, I hope they can discover its rich sensory qualities and the painterly beauty it contains.

Afterimage, 2026, Oil on canvas, 162 x 112 cm

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

My current project is my solo exhibition, Penumbra, at Pageroom8. In this exhibition, I explore the subtle sensations and afterimages that emerge at the threshold where light and shadow meet. Moving between natural and artificial light, figuration and abstraction, and the material and the immaterial, I seek to translate the traces and sensations left by light onto the canvas. Looking ahead, I intend to continue exploring light as the central theme of my practice—not only light itself, but also the ways it transforms space, memory, and sensation. Rather than treating painting as a means of simply representing an image, I hope to continue pursuing painterly experiments in which sensations and experiences accumulate, giving rise to new and diverse ways of perceiving and experiencing the world.