Jean Shin’s Ritual Communions

Jean Shin’s philosophy as an artist is simple yet instructive: create with what you have. Over the course of the last 30 years, the Brooklyn-based artist has mapped connections with yarn from donated sweaters (Unraveling (2006–2009)), conjured farmscapes using plastic soda bottles (MAiZE (2017)), and erected monuments to technological obsolescence out of discarded cell phones (Huddled Masses (2020)).

Shin maintained her pragmatic approach when scouting Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, where she noticed two displaced trees—a pin oak and a red oak. Both had lived almost a century before their decline necessitated their removal, and had been sitting off to the side, unceremoniously, for years.

Shin proposed Offering (2026) as a way to give the elderly trees a proper burial and honor the history of where they were rooted. In the winter, the grave was dug. Along with Dannielle Tegeder from the feminist artist collective Hilma’s Ghost, Shin led a procession to the open grave ringing bells. In the spring, the site was transformed into a Korean-inspired tumuli mound planted with native wildflowers. Mudang Jenn, a Korean shaman, blessed water with mugwort, a traditional medicinal herb, which was then ceremonially poured onto the mound. Both occasions were open to the public, and those in attendance participated in the rituals.

“I was wanting to continue my practice and projects of mourning trees,” Shin told me, as we circled the buried oaks.

Offering represents a continuation of earlier works such as Allée Gathering (2019), in which Shin reclaimed dying maple trees at Storm King Art Center and repurposed the timber into a communal table and benches. By then, the artist had relocated her studio from Red Hook, Brooklyn, to New York’s Hudson Valley, where she splits her time. Further north, her subsequent commission Fallen (2021), installed at Olana State Historic Site, the former estate of Hudson River School artist Frederic Church, commemorated a local species—a deceased eastern hemlock, its trunk enshrouded in leather and laid out for visitors to come pay their respects.

For Shin, each work builds on what came before. “Every project seems to teach me something that the next project leads to, and then I understand better what the last project was,” she said.

At Green-Wood, the two of us sat on one of the many stones intentionally placed around the mound. Their invitation for quiet reflection reminded me of the scholar’s rocks evoked in Huddled Masses, the statuesque forms covered by the black mirrored surface of cell phone screens. On some of the other stones unearthed at the cemetery, Shin had carved shallow basins to provide birdbaths, and I thought of her assembling sculptural branches from fallen trees and salvaged copper to create Perch (2024) for bobolinks, a migratory songbird found at Appleton Farms in Massachusetts. Whether addressing e-waste or outdoor environments, she views each seemingly discrete undertaking as merely “a genre within this larger, interconnected conversation.”

In the same breath, Shin acknowledged the difficulty of navigating an industry that prefers artists to have a “signature style” or to stay in their lane. “I don’t have lanes,” she insisted, describing her journey as one that she’s “learning from and unlearning from every day.”

Shin earned a degree in art history and initially studied painting, focusing on portraiture and the figure. She found herself invested in not just what people looked like but their interiority, including that of her own family, and what it means to really represent this. Her work can be viewed as an expansion of her formal training, while her instincts remain deeply rooted in her cultural heritage as a Korean American. She remembers spending hours with her grandmother preparing and folding dumplings—“That felt to me like the most beautiful, early memory of making.” It’s a tradition Shin has carried into her annual Lunar New Year celebrations, which she generously opens up to not just family but also friends. She is well-known for giving people a reason to gather, and that spirit of collectivity also reverberates in her work.