Shin Jungkyun (b. 1986) has consistently explored the moment when everyday landscapes are transformed into specific signs, revealing the underlying anxieties embedded within them. His practice, which includes archives composed of found objects and videos in the form of mockumentaries, constructs narratives that traverse the boundary between reality and fiction.

Shin Jungkyun’s work begins by delving into the fissures of everyday reality. Like a covert agent on a secret mission, the artist collects information and materials from mundane moments, documenting them through video and weaving them into narratives that operate on an entirely different dimension. 

For instance, his 2010 video work Universal Story takes the Korean military experience—a rite of passage for most Korean men—as its backdrop. While military service is widely regarded as an ordinary, obligatory experience in Korea, it is in fact a highly structured institution where the state’s grand ideology operates with particular intensity. Within this socio-cultural framework, the individual is thoroughly reduced to a “universal being.”

The video begins with the artist returning to the military base where he once served. By capturing the site with his camera and recounting his personal memories and experiences, Shin Jungkyun brings to light stories often left in the shadows of individual memory. Through this work, he resurrects the suppressed narratives of the "individual" within a space governed by the logic of the "universal." In doing so, he questions whether the personal experiences endured within the highly regulated system of the military can truly be considered universal.

These questions, sparked by Shin Jungkyun’s autobiographical experience, extend into Uncovered Trace (2013). While his previous work explored the individual’s place within a larger society through deeply personal memories, this piece shifts focus to the everyday and ordinary traces found in his surroundings. 

In this work, Shin interrogates the nature of ideology internalized while growing up in a divided country like South Korea. For him, ideology feels like an "unseen reality"—something that seems not to exist due to its invisibility. Yet, through a series of events he encounters in daily life, he comes to realize that ideology is not separate from himself but embedded within the fabric of the everyday.

Shin Jungkyun began re-examining everyday landscapes and objects in an effort to identify the ideas and beliefs that shape his worldview—those implanted in the individual by society. During this process, familiar scenes from a neighborhood park or the nearby mountain he frequently visited, along with objects discovered in his home, began to take on symbolic meaning. The traces of the past he encountered prompted him to question things he had previously been unaware of. 

In response, Shin began collecting items from his home that could be interpreted differently depending on context, and repeatedly observed familiar places in unfamiliar ways. These acts became a means of retracing what had been unconsciously imprinted and internalized—a process of confronting the ideological forces embedded within his own inner landscape.

The texts and images in Shin Jungkyun’s work—reconstructed through personal experiences and research—may originate from an individual perspective, but they extend into the realm of collective memory to explore new meanings.
 
For instance, by rewriting the lyrics of a popular song in Okryuche, a typeface associated with a specific ideology, he transforms an everyday phrase into a piece of propaganda. In another example, he edits footage of ordinary places to resemble concealed military sites, turning familiar imagery into something uncanny and unsettling. 

Through such methods, Shin’s work challenges conventional perceptions of everyday reality, drawing attention to how personal realms gain alternative layers of meaning when positioned within broader sociopolitical or historical contexts. His approach—marked by observation, documentation, reference, and re-editing—continues to be a defining methodology in his practice, constructing unexpected narratives from seemingly mundane materials.

In Numbers Station (2015–2016), Shin Jungkyun shifts from exploring personal memory or specific locations to investigating a particular radio transmission method known as “numbers stations.” These mysterious broadcasts transmit sequences of numbers or words over specific frequencies—messages that can only be deciphered with a corresponding one-time pad or codebook.
 
Shin became interested in numbers stations after learning that this Cold War-era espionage method, once dormant, had resumed broadcasting in Korean around 2012. Intrigued by its cryptic nature, he traveled to Germany to meet a YouTuber who had been recording and uploading these broadcasts in an attempt to decode them. Yet even this dedicated individual offered no clear answers, valuing the act of collecting data more than uncovering its meaning. 

In response, the artist began his work by reassembling and presenting the information and materials he had gathered during the process of traveling to meet the YouTuber. In the course of this, coincidental situations and unrelated images were added, further amplifying the fictional construction.

Based on the collected materials related to this, the artist created an installation work that staged a space. He primarily utilized leftover areas such as offices attached to exhibition spaces, stairway storage rooms, and underground passages, recontextualizing existing spaces through the act of viewers uncovering hidden areas.
 
After the exhibition period, it was a principle to restore the spaces to their original condition, thereby creating a temporary situation that existed for a limited time before disappearing, reenacting a fictional character who analyzes orders and then vanishes. 

The intermediate nature of numbers stations—which produce meaning only when decoded by experts—and the fictional construction based on real everyday spaces and objective facts disrupt viewers’ perception of “truth,” amplifying only doubt.

In this way, Shin Jungkyun has focused on places and information with restricted access, conducting investigations such as researching numbers stations or tracking underground bunkers located on school campuses as attempts to uncover their identities. In 2019, continuing along this trajectory, he began to pay attention to technological environments that do not directly reveal their presence but influence intimate aspects of life.

For example, in Steganography Tutorial (2019), Shin Jungkyun reveals the reality of anxiety surrounding the invisible spread and breach of individuals’ digitized information within technological environments. To do this, the artist employed steganography, a deep encryption technique that hides confidential information within photos or audio files.
 
During his travels, he revisited locations captured by chance in photographs using maps, then inscribed sentences onto those images and re-encrypted them, distributing the process in the form of a YouTube tutorial. 

The encrypted images were also displayed in physical exhibition spaces; however, since the printed photographs themselves do not function as encrypted files, they express a kind of ‘faith’ in security devices that supposedly protect them from surveillance. Yet, by allowing anyone to reproduce and take these images, the work raises the question of whether complete security is truly possible.

Afterward, Shin Jungkyun experienced the sudden global disaster of COVID-19 and began reflecting on the primal anxiety directly tied to survival. At this time, the artist focused on the individual’s existence and sense of survival amid an uncertain disaster with no clear end in sight. 

Based on these reflections, A Person Walking on Tiptoe (2021) was created, documenting an acrobatic performance set against the backdrop of an abandoned water intake facility no longer in use. In the video, the acrobat climbs a rope suspended from a hoist and struggles to turn a rusted gear that barely moves.

In this work, the artist states that rather than merely illustrating how the substance of anxiety became visible after the pandemic—exposing our vulnerabilities and making what once felt unreal tangibly perceptible—he sought to develop new modes of behavior in response and explore a bodily sense of direction. 

To this end, Shin Jungkyun imagined the closed water intake facility as a shelter to virtually reenact a situation that has not yet occurred. Through the acrobat’s body, he created movements resembling the act of overcoming some condition. Watching the repetitive motions in the dark, damp space, one begins to sense the tangible form of anxiety that touches our bodies, leading to questions about how we might protect ourselves from disasters.

Afterwards, Shin Jungkyun began to take an interest in preservation and produced documentary videos capturing museum storage rooms and specimen archives. Through his investigation into recording and preservation, the artist discovered that these processes still operate based on uncertain methods such as data loss, critical errors, and ambiguous judgments. 

In his solo exhibition 《Prophecy & Scenario》 (2025) at Amado Art Space, the artist questioned not so much the factual concerns about the importance of records or the stability of storage, but rather the true nature of those industries themselves. For example, the travelogue-style video work Valley & Holes (2023), which documents a visit to the Svalbard Arctic World Archive (AWA), blends unrelated footage with fictional narratives, disturbing the boundary between reality and fiction.

Based on a real incident in which a laboratory failed to establish a consistent preservation system—resulting in the complete disposal of animal specimens collected over a long period due to mold contamination—Instructions for G2 Lab Manager (2025) creates a sense of distance from reality through fictional elements such as a manual-turned-ghost-story format and filtered video imagery. 

The inverted-color visuals evoke an empty laboratory at night, while Chopin’s nocturne—transformed into the eerie tones of a music box that gradually loses its wind—resonates ominously. In contrast to the conventional function of a manual, which is to pledge specific actions and provide clear guidance, this presentation transforms the manual into an unsettling device that heightens psychological tension.

In this way, Shin Jungkyun has consistently questioned whether what we see, experience, or take for granted is truly real. However, his interest does not lie in uncovering the essence behind appearances to reveal the truth, but rather in exploring the unstable and ambiguous points associated with them. 

By altering socially familiar symbols or signifiers and employing methods such as mockumentaries and meta-archives that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, the artist renders reality unfamiliar. This allows viewers to confront the unstable states concealed beneath the frameworks of perception shaped by overarching social structures.

 Even if a truly valid solution cannot be found, I believed that one’s attitude or stance toward the subject could become clearer. In this way, I think the psychology of our anxiety can, in another sense, become a driving force to search for alternatives.”    (Shin Jungkyun, from an interview in 《Young Korean Artists 2021》, MMCA) 

Shin Jungkyun earned his BFA in Fine Art and Media Art from Seoul National University in 2012, followed by an MFA in Fine Art in 2019. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the same department at Seoul National University.
 
His recent solo exhibitions include 《Prophecy & Scenario》 (Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2025), 《Last of Us》 (SAHNG-UP Gallery Euljiro, Seoul, 2023), 《Lift & Drift》 (SongEun Art Space, Seoul, 2021), and 《Acrobat》 (Art Space BOAN2, Seoul, 2021).
 
Selected group exhibitions include 《Ordinary World》 (Korean Cultural Center, Paris, 2024), 《Anxieties, when Shared》 (Coreana Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024), 《Past. Present. Future.》 (SONGEUN, Seoul, 2022), 《Young Korean Artists 2021》 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, 2021), and 《DOOSAN Art Lab: Part 2》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2019). 

He has participated in artist-in-residence programs such as the SeMA Nanji Residency (2023), SongEun Artist Studio (2020), and MMCA Residency Goyang (2017). His works are included in the collections of the MMCA Art Bank, Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, SongEun Art and Cultural Foundation, and ARGOS Centre for Audiovisual Arts.

References

• 신정균, Shin Jungkyun (Artist Website)
• 김성우, 존재하지 않는 실체를 추적하기 위한 방법 (KIM, Sung woo, A Methodology for Tracking Non-existent Substance)
• 이수정, 유사 다큐멘터리로 그려낸 극사실의 세계 (Soojung Lee, A Fictional Documentary Reflecting a Hyper realist World)
• 아마도예술공간, [서문] 예언과 시나리오 – 신양희 (Amado Art Space, [Preface] Prophecy & Scenario – Yanghee Shin)
• 국립현대미술관 뮤클리, 동시대 미술의 현재이자 미래, 《젊은 모색 2021》 인터뷰 2편