Installation with Sun Yung Shin for Solidarity Street Gallery
This fall, Second Shift Studio Space participated in the Solidarity Street Gallery, an outdoor community art event that took place October 1-3 at approximately 20 exhibit sites, spread along Payne Avenue between Phalen Blvd and Maryland Ave. For the event, Second Shift Studio Space resident artists, Shen Xin, AK Garski, and Erika Terwilliger. organized an installation by Sun Yung Shin.
Displayed in Second Shift Studio’s gallery windows, the installation consisted of Sun Yung Shin’s poetry in written and video forms. The poetry was derived from Shin’s new book with Godfre Leung, granted to a foreign citizen. The book was published by the Vancouver publisher/artist-run center Artspeak on October 16.
granted to a foreign citizen is a new book of poetry by Sun Yung Shin. It sifts through ephemera from Shin’s naturalization as an American citizen as a young Korean adoptee in the late 1970s and writes them into a minor history that connects the early years of the transnational, transracial adoption industry to the ongoing tactic of family separation in US border and immigration policy. Throughout, Shin’s poetic voice struggles to achieve moments of self-actualized lyricality within the banal violence of bureaucratic procedures.
granted to a foreign citizen was commissioned as part of UNSTATELY, a yearlong series of programs on fiction and the nation-state curated by Godfre Leung. Together, the projects that make up UNSTATELY pursue an ethics through kinds of speculative thinking found in the practices and cultures of migration. Part one, the exhibition Pao Houa Her: Emplotment, took place at Or Gallery; the third and final program, which brings together the bookwork by Shin, Jinny Yu, and Republic of the Other, will be presented at Hotam Press Bookshop/Gallery.)"
신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea, during 박 정 희 Park Chung-hee's military dictatorship, and grew up in the Chicago area. She is the editor of the best-selling anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, author of poetry collections Unbearable Splendor (finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award for Poetry, winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black(winner of the 2007 Asian American Literary Award for poetry), co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and author of a bilingual illustrated book for children Cooper’s Lesson. She lives in Minneapolis where she co-directs the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang.
photo credit: Uche Iroegbu
Find more of Sun Young Shin’s work at https://www.sunyungshin.com