Soo Shin – Weaving as Human Relationship

Weaving is one of the eldest crafts we know. Since thousands of years mostly women are weaving clothes, blankets and tapestry to warm or decorate their family or houses. In fairy tales weaving has immense mystic power and in ancient mythology the stories of women weaving are uncounted. Penelope for example waited for her husband Ulysses. She had devised tricks to delay her suitors, one of which was to pretend to be weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's elderly father Laertes and claiming that she would choose a suitor when she had finished. But every night she undid part of the shroud. Weaving hour after hour while thinking of her beloved husband was her rescue. After twenty years Ulysses returned and they were happily united. Penelope became a symbol of fidelity.

Soo Shin weaves too. Hour after hour, thread after thread. She reflects the working process; it becomes part of the metaphor:

The process of putting two different materials (Warp and Weft) together and connecting them as one piece is a really beautiful gesture like building up our relationships with others interrelating information and creating new experiences. And the way each thread of warp and weft is related also reminds me of human relationship. They are together but still being individuals not loosing their own nature and never melted into the other. (Soo Shin)

Soo Shin creates work pieces of delicate beauty. Her current installation consists of two tubular clothes connected with one common sleeve. In gentle shades of orange, red and beige they are shimmering with silky luster. The work may recall the closest form of living together: Conjoined twins, their circulation of blood interwoven, and every twin depending on the other for lifetime. But Soo Shin transposes this idea into a romantic metaphor of deliberateness and freedom, visualised in clothes of immense and touching tenderness:

With this exhibition I wanted to show different relationships between two people by creating clothes that can be worn in close distance and video piece of two people wearing another woven clothes in long distance. I've been thinking about correlation of physical distance and emotional proximity. And I tried to create diverse connection of people using actual distance in different space. (Soo Shin)

SOO SHIN, born in Seoul, Korea in 1981, received her B.F.A. in Printmaking and Painting from the Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea in 2004. In 2007 she received her M.F.A. from the same University, also in Printmaking and Painting. In 2011 she will obtain her M.F.A. in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA.

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