Kyungmi Shin, Othered Dreams

ZIAN Gallery at SUPPER CLUB| March 24-30, 9/FH Queen’s, 80 Queen’s Road Central, Central, Hong Kong

Kyungmi Shin’s installation at Supper Club, “Kyungmi Shin: Othered Dreams”, critically engages with the historical constructs of fantasy and mythology embedded within Chinoiserie and broader European imaginaries of the East. By juxtaposing these exoticised visions with actual Asian folklore and mythological traditions, the work interrogates the enduring legacies of imperialist and post-colonialist gazes and the aestheticisation of otherness. The installation’s background wallpaper draws from Antoine Watteau’s 18th-century Chinoiserie etchings, interwoven with its contemporaneous Dutch travel illustrations that romanticised Asia as an enigmatic and distant realm. Two painted wood panels synthesise Dutch and Korean still-life traditions, with a tiger serving as a liminal figure that mediates between these artistic lineages.