THE VOW BY TJ SHIN

MOUSSE MAGAZINE
ISSUE 88 (SUMMER 2024)

“Drawing on theories that have influenced their visual art practice, artist TJ Shin considers the linguistic and social structures that shape the relationships among a writer, a text, a reader, and a larger ‘center’ of meaning—whether a grammatical position to which other terms relate, or an institution to which people relate. These centers often create hierarchies of subjects based on their relative distance: Whose words, whose works, carry the most weight, and whose must be defended? How might this relative distance allow for different communities and types of meaning to emerge? In what follows, Shin unpacks these questions via a discussion of their recent essay ‘야생의 파도와 함께 with tides of the wild,’ published in fall 2023 with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York, a nonprofit organization founded at the New School in 1992 whose artist-centered publications and programs include a residency and a site dedicated to experimental writing.”

—Mira Dayal