A Portrait of Nostalgia 

A Portrait of Nostalgia transcends more than the notion that portraiture is an art reserved only for personhood. Deftly interweaving traditional and contemporary, Jihye Shin’s new series melds the seemingly disparate into brilliant narratives that all but leap from the surface. The artist breathes new life into countless time-honored practices—her materials of choice, for example, being Bunchae pigment upon Hanji paper—to create landscapes that are simultaneously familiar and impossible. Though  recognizably informed by her mastery of traditional techniques, Shin’s voice is strikingly her own; unrestrained by demarcations of time and space, homages to the past are revitalized into explorations of the present. Iconography morphs from recognizable to dreamlike: a slice of Ferris wheel breaks off from the pie, carousel ponies gallop from their perpetual stations, and the Chicago skyline flattens itself into an unfamiliar sky. 

But though her scenes are fantastical in nature, Shin’s confident forms evoke a sensation of lucidity that the splendor depicted cannot be anything but real. Everything is imbued with the potential to transform, a perspective informed by the artist’s own experience moving to a new country fraught with both illuminating discoveries and novel challenges. A Portrait of Nostalgia serves also as an archive of the cultural complexities of belonging, of the ever-shifting nature of memory, and of the diasporic journey of learning to call home by a new name. 

Indeed, it is not solely representational likeliness Shin aims to capture, but the very essence of place itself—and the transient nuance that accompanies it. If every locale exists as a palimpsest of all that came before it, Shin’s paintings serve as their maps: rich layers of history and culture unfold themselves, wave after wave, to impart upon viewers a salient sense that despite—or, more precisely, because—the migratory nature of mankind, incredible vibrance textures the world around us.