52 Walker is pleased to announce its eighth exhibition, THE BIG NUDES, which will feature the work of New York–based artist Heji Shin (b. 1976). Throughout her photographic practice, Shin has skirted the boundaries of convention, creating images that challenge judgments of taste vis-à-vis fashion, celebrity, and sexuality. This will be Shin’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2020.
Shaped by both the commercial and fine-art realms, Shin’s eye mines the prohibited and the liminal to deconstruct notions of propriety. At 52 Walker, Shin juxtaposes two discrete bodies of work that trouble and transform our ideas of what constitutes a portrait—while examining how emerging technologies represent sentient bodies and how the genre of portraiture purports to reveal alternative versions of the self. One pictures scans of her own brain, captured with the MRI examination technique known as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), while the other comprises “nudes”—fleshy pink pigs whose epidermal layers and hair appear uncannily humanoid.
Image: Heji Shin, Eat Me, 2023 © Heji Shin.