Lympha Lympha! (림파 림파!): Fay Shin

Curator: Euna Bae
Sponsored by: Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture

Lympha Lympha!, a solo exhibition by artist Fay Shin, will be taking place from December 23, 2023, to January 17, 2024, at Gallery Chosun (Sogyeok-dong 125, Jongno-gu, Seoul).
Lympha Lympha! is a feast of colors, performed by artist Fay Shin’s painted surfaces as they float lithely between substance and body, like transparent lymph that sustains life with a forcefulness that belies its thinness and tiny size.

As an artist, Fay Shin has created her own creative language by deconstructing and expanding surfaces and support structures as constituent elements of painting. Based on the experiences she has gained through the practices of meditation and yoga, she has focused on internal concentration and the integration of binary realms such as the body and mind, the natural and artificial, and the subject and object. Faced with the human limitation of being vulnerable to unpredictable external environments, she has explored painting as an expanded subjecthood, where she is able to let go of herself and permit transformation. As a continuation of this, her latest exhibition uses the rhythmic cry of Lympha Lympha! to capture the combinations and collisions of materials interacting through the vitality of water, a substance that is constantly unfixed, flowing, and transforming.

A Latin word meaning “water,” lympha is the etymological origin of the word “lymph,” a substance that densely connects the pathways within our bodies.

“Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.”
– Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

We live under the conditions assigned to us by the world. It seems like quite an obvious statement to make, but how can we venture to speak of “us” in the face of the differences that exist between the world created by my given conditions and the one created by another’s? It’s a question we are obliged to ponder. The binary boundaries that divide material from non-material, human from non-human, organism from non-organism, and nature from not-nature only gain equality when confronted with the vulnerability of the conditions that each of them face. The painted surfaces that Fay Shin creates are presented as different objects confronting and embracing all the trouble of the lives assigned to “us.” They are the score for their own melodies as works that let go of all the prestige of painting as something subordinate to the robustness of art and as creations that communicate with the world, achieving their own breath in a relationship of mutuality. In this way, Fay Shin is pursuing painting as a potentiality that connects in new ways as it is constantly transformed by its environment, painting that exists as a momentary connection here and now even as it endlessly mutates into new beings. But what is this painting, and what makes it possible?

“[A]dmit that the environment is actually inside human bodies and minds, and then proceed politically, technologically, scientifically, in everyday life, with careful forbearance. . . .”
- Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

With Lympha Lympha!, Fay Shin presents painting as an in-between space, a collaboration between her body and water in which she gives herself over to affect, transporting the paint in a dance with the canvas. Overcoming the user/used relationship that is customarily established with materials in the creative process, she experiments with a relational transformation in terms of what connection material holds with her own life and what influences it is capable of exerting. Shin closely observes the patterns and traces that are formed through the “encounters” between water and various coloring agents that can often be found in our day-to-day lives—including mulberry leaves, acrylic, and bleach—as she transports them onto her surfaces. As substances that respectively harbor natural, artificial, and toxic ingredients, these three materials affect us through our skin, respiratory organs, and digestive organs within our living environments. Drawing inspiration from the ways in which they permeate the body, react with cells, transform, and are released once again, the artist backs away from the user’s intervening hand, allowing them to emerge on the fabric according to their respective natures as they come together with water. Shin refers to this as a “time of giving over,” adopting an object-oriented stance in which she lets go of her role as subject and waits for the substances to organize through their individual actions and interactions. She also incorporates various forms of fabric that we use and discard in our lives, including linen, silk, and Tencel. By dyeing them and placing them on a stainless steel support, she is connecting painting with interior aspects of our everyday life. As she freely alternates between the subjective role of creator and the objective role of the body, Fay Shin expands painting into an inclusive medium of coexistence—between the natural and artificial, between human beings and materials, between art and daily life. She further expands into a thinking medium, which ponders the attainment of a realm where abstract painting comes together with the world.

This exhibition features work from three series involving transformed and recombined fabric, which Fay Shin created at Incheon Art Platform during a 2022 residency there: Poem, Poison, and Metamorphosis (2022–23), A Body Unfolded in Five Million Years (2022–23), and The Clarity Reached after Resistance (2022). It also includes the new work Relay Greetings toward a Hidden Nebula (2023). Lympha Lympha! marks the end of a 2023 that has been filled with collisions and entanglements, while connecting it with another year of coexistence in 2024. For viewers, this is an opportunity to open the door and experience, if only briefly, the thin waterways that fill the body, and to give their bodies over to the rhythms of their flows.