Jean Shin

For Chinatown 20/20, Jean Shin attached panels embedded with prescription eyeglass lenses and frames to existing storefronts. The framed lenses create small glass peepholes in the wall that simultaneously focus and refract the vision for viewers looking into and out of the building. Shin explains, "The peepholes represent many individual 'insights' into Chinatown and consequently how this collective vision brings Chinatown into focus."

Interview

Please explain the process you used for creating your piece (materials used, major steps).

For most visitors, their experiences of Chinatown are centered on eating at Asian restaurants and shopping at tourist souvenir shops. I was interested in the other types of storefront businesses that are active in the local community but often go unnoticed by visitors (such as beauty and hair salons, noodle and fortune cookie factories, Chinese video stores, accountants and doctors offices, etc.) I initially walked around Chinatown to identify possible businesses with storefront windows that would be ideal for my project. With the assistance of a translator, we approached the business owners to see if they were interested in hosting one of my installations in their window. Once I had the sites confirmed, I designed the eyeglass pieces to fit the exact size of the panels that would go in front of the windows and fabricate the works.

How did you come up with the concept for your piece?
a. How did the retreats help you develop your concept?
b. How did seeing Chinatown and talking to Chinatown residents affect your concept for the piece?

I was aware that, in many ways, I'm an outsider to Chinatown. Although it was great to personally meet the locals and hear their perceptions of Chinatown, I came to realize that these stories were only fragments of what was going on in Philadelphia's Chinatown, that in fact, no single person or group can know Chinatown in its entirety. I knew that I too wouldn't be able to truly understand all the workings of this place, its history and the issues faced by the community. In reality, most visitors already have a perception of Chinatown that may or may not be true. I was interested in playing with this notion of perception.

Prescription eyeglasses were the ideal medium for me in addressing this concept of perception. Each pair of prescription glasses presents literally a different point of view. Depending on who's doing the looking, the same reality is seen differently by each person-some views blurry or clear, others magnified or completely abstracted. In essence, I am presenting viewers with little peepholes into the day-to-day interior scenes of various shops and offices; at the same time, the prescription lenses obscure viewers' ability to see this reality clearly. The framed prescription lenses paradoxically both focus as well as make ambiguous the scenes that lie beyond the wall (in the interior of the building). My hope is that, through this interactive process of witnessing fragments of Chinatown, viewers become more aware of their own distinct perceptions and points of view.

How does your piece fit with the goals for In/flux?
Why did you choose to be part of an exhibition in Chinatown?
Did the process of creating your piece (retreats) change your perception of Chinatown?
Did you make any relationships with people in Chinatown or generally with the community in Chinatown?

Chinatown is a great site-it is visually and historically very stimulating. Being Korean-American and growing up with immigrant parents who owned an urban retail business, I can relate to some of the issues the individuals living and working in Chinatown face; at the same time, the distance allows me to be artistically creative in my approach to the In/flux project.

Chinatown is changing dramatically. My project suggests that there is not simply one correct vision of Chinatown; by seeing different points of view of many changing realities, we begin to gain a collective vision of Chinatown in flux.

It was a pleasure working with Ms. Susanna Wong, a local insurance agent who was my translator. With her assistance, I meet the other merchants and she gave me access to this community in a way that was very welcoming. Her connections and familiarity with the individuals in Chinatown allowed collaborations with shop owners that would otherwise have been very difficult.

How does this work fit with your wider body of work?

My work speaks of the optimism inherent in giving new form to life's leftovers. I accumulate and transform discarded materials, placing them into a new context that allows me to comment on society. My sculptures and large-scale installations recall the initial history of an object and its relationship to the body, while also suggesting broader connections to our collective desires and struggles. My inventory of cast-off or obsolete materials includes broken umbrellas, donated clothing, altered pant cuffs, losing lottery tickets, blank Rolodex cards, and old prescription eyeglasses. In repeating a single object hundreds or even thousands of times, I generate a homogeneous, monumental structure that simultaneously emphasizes elements of individuality as well as multiplicity that are both present in the material. Through the process of deconstructing these accumulations, the objects acquire new meanings and associations. In my installations, the focus shifts constantly between the individual and the shared experience, the single unit and the larger whole, the intimate and the monumental. These dualities are mirrored in my working process where products of mass production are transformed through handmade labor.

Frequently, my work is sited outdoors and in the public realm. By placing these reconstructions back into the community, I invite interactions with a public that brings its own histories to the work. In this way the installation begins to create its own imagined community of shared experiences. My installations of remnants provide the means for a chance encounter that celebrates interconnectedness.