Shen Xin creates moving image, video installations and performances that seek to empower alternative histories, relations, and potentials between individuals and nation states. The artist aspires to create affirmative spaces of belonging that embrace polyphonic narratives and identities. Confronting the layered complexities of the world, their practice investigates multiple forms of otherness that aim to undermine dominant narratives and hegemonic power structures.

Recently acquired by M HKA, Brine Lake (A New Body) (2020) is an episodic, multichannel video and sound installation that mediates on the relationship between ecology and ethnic identification. Using the process of iodine recycling as a metaphor for statelessness, Brine Lake relates the experiences of Korean immigrants in Russia and Japan. Combining historic and fictive narratives, human and nonhuman protagonists, and multiple languages, the installation operates as a space of reflection on the topics such as personal memory, migrant populations, extractive economies, separation and belonging.

Artists: Shen Xin