Kyungmi Shin South Korea, b. 1963

Kyungmi Shin was born in 1963 in Busan, South Korea, and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Before pursuing a career in art, she trained as a scientist, earning a degree in chemistry and working as a chemist at a pharmaceutical company. The death of her mother prompted a decisive turn toward art-making, and she subsequently completed her M.F.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1995. She has since built a practice of over three decades that spans painting, sculpture, photography, video, and large-scale public art.

Shin's work interrogates the histories, identities, and migrations produced by colonialism, capitalism, and religious expansion, and their lasting effects on material culture and representation. Working frequently in large-scale photo collage, she layers archival imagery, including family photographs and art-historical sources, with hand-painted elements to create works in which personal and collective memory intersect. Her practice took a significant turn after 2005, when she began spending extended periods living and building a studio in Ghana, West Africa. What began as a search for an affordable studio environment evolved into an immersive confrontation with global inequality, fear, guilt, and the deep asymmetries between the developed and developing world. This experience catalyzed a sustained body of work examining the mechanisms of global connectedness, from colonial trade routes to contemporary immigration, through the lens of both historical evidence and lived encounter.

Shin's work is held in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and the Newark Museum of Art, Newark, New Jersey, among others. She has completed more than twenty public artworks across the United States, including a video sculpture installed at the Netflix headquarters in Hollywood (2018) and a large-scale glass and steel mosaic commissioned for the Intuit Dome, the home of the Los Angeles Clippers in Inglewood, California (2024). Among the grants and fellowships she has received: the City of Los Angeles Master Artist Grant (COLA); the California Community Foundation Grant; the Durfee Grant; the Pasadena City Individual Artist Fellowship; and the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Artist-in-Residence Grant.

Shin's exhibition history spans institutions in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Solo and significant group presentations include exhibitions at the Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana (2020-21); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2021-22, 2023); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2022); Galerie Marguo, Paris (2022); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2023); Sperone Westwater, New York (2024, 2025); Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2024); Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (2024); the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Sonje Art Museum, Korea; the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles; and the Torrance Art Museum, California. Her work has also been featured in NPR and reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Artillery, and Contemporary Art Review LA, among other publications.

Kyungmi Shin's relationship with KORNFELD Galerie Berlin grew out of the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House Berlin Fellowship, co-organized with 68projects by KORNFELD. In 2023, Shin came to Berlin as a fellow, living and working in the city for several months, absorbing the local art scene and developing new work through artistic encounters and collaborations. This residency culminated in her solo exhibition Fly to India for Gold, Ransack the Ocean for Orient Pearl at 68projects by KORNFELD (January 13 to February 24, 2024), in which she explored the intertwined histories of Germany and Asia through layered cultural imagery. In 2024, she was also included in Berlin on My Mind: Celebrating 10 Years of Artistic Residency at 68projects by KORNFELD, the milestone group exhibition bringing together all twenty-one artists who have participated in the residency program since its founding.

Kyungmi Shin's practice continues to expand its geographic and historical reach, with each new body of work extending her inquiry into the entangled legacies of colonialism, migration, and cross-cultural exchange.