• JAEDON SHINACAE Gallery
• Time: Jul 23,2025

The Centre Cannot Hold

Summoning: the Swirls of Emotions, the Stains of (R)evolution

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

-from ‘The Second Coming’ by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

When a night battle takes place in the mountains,

how can we identify our side from the enemy?

It is so dark and we can't see anything in front of us.

In great fear, are we going to attack anybody and kill each other?

-words by Jaedon Shin, posed to his series / exhibition ‘Double Moon’ at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2022

Artist Jaedon Shin’s question, posed for his solo exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, reverberates in a time when, as poet W.B. Yeats warned, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed once more. As these words are being typed, battles continue across the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and beyond. Shin’s birthplace, South Korea, also remains suspended in a decades-long conflict with its northern neighbour—a war without end, a nation caught between truce and tension. In the widening gyre of algorithmic feeds and media echo chambers, enemies are identified and groups demarcated with alarming speed. This dynamic, far from remote, has shaped Australia domestically as well. Yet in the artist's view, what unfolds in the world also unravels within. These outer conflicts mirror internal ones, flickering through the psyche like shadows. It is in these personal, unresolved terrains that the possibility for reconciliation, however faint, may still reside.

Whether one is an artist or not, confronting inner turmoil requires a chaotic yet crucial opening of wounds. Shin compares the various personal, historical, and political events he experienced as ghosts from his nightmares, summoned one by one onto the canvas. The exhibition ‘The Centre Cannot Hold,’ featuring paintings from Shin’s series ‘Temple of Ten Thousand Spirits’ and other bodies of work, is a testament to how the act of painting and authorship involves a projection of the artist’s inner turmoil or, according to the artist, “an artistic ritual amid shambles.”

JAEDON SHIN

Temple Of Ten Thousand Spirits

2023-2024

acrylic on cotton

200 x 250 cm

While some works feature icons, characters, and landscapes from his previous series, the new paintings are no longer tethered to tranquillity. Extending his historical references, art-specific allusions and text references appear with greater frequency, making for more complex readings. Familiar landscapes, redolent with nighttime calm, are carried over from Shin’s previous works, forming backdrops for ongoing battles. In ‘Temple of Ten Thousand Spirits’ (2024), the artist’s oft-used ‘double moon’ symbol becomes detached from philosophical or diaspora-inspired references, acquiring a wider symbolic potency. Far from alluding to ‘self and the other,’ ‘two Koreas,’ or ‘Korea and Australia,’ the two celestial bodies connote merely allies and enemies. Unlike Shin’s sociopolitical compositions linked to situations on the Korean peninsula, works like ‘Temple of Ten Thousand Spirits’ (2024) transcend a single geographical context. Rather, they are reminiscent of recent and ongoing conflicts across the world. The smoke rising from the landscape in ‘Sky Road’ (2024) and ‘Sky Road - Things Disappearing’ (2024) repeats the swirling pattern seen in ‘Temple of Ten Thousand Spirits’ (2024); here, perhaps, is Shin’s metaphor for the whirlwind of history.

JAEDON SHIN

Temple Of Ten Thousand Spirits 6

2024

acrylic on linen

100 x 120 cm

Explicit historical references are apparent in works such as ‘Temple of Ten Thousand Spirits 6’ (2024), which, amongst other motifs, features past leaders such as U.S. President Harry Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin. The trio are depicted during their participation in the historically significant 1945 Potsdam Conference, a meeting in which the post-World War II peace was established, along with the division of Germany. The pragmatic leaders are positioned diagonally across from a cartoon rendering of South Korean dictator Park Chung-Hee, who, rather than negotiating with opponents, imposed authoritarian rule on his country throughout the 1960s and ‘70s.

JAEDON SHIN

Temple Of Ten Thousand Spirits 10

2024

acrylic on linen

100 x 120 cm

In contrast, the ‘Temple Of Ten Thousand Spirits 10’ (2024) pays homage to Pablo Picasso’s monumental anti-war painting ‘Guernica’ (1937). This is achieved through Shin interposing his signature characters with Picasso’s iconic female figures, agonised horse, and unremitting lightbulb, which feature so prominently in ‘Guernica.’ Similarly, Shin’s ‘The Death of a Revolutionary’ (2024) is a nod to art history and the artist’s earlier work. Playing to the image of Jacques-Louis David’s ‘The Death of Marat’ (1793), Shin substitutes the French revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793) with the figure of Hwang Jang-Yop, the highest-ranking North Korean to defect to South Korea. Notably, Hwang was responsible for crafting the state ideology of North Korea called ‘Juche.’ Not dissimilar to Marat, the North Korean polemicist also expired in his bathtub.

JAEDON SHIN

The Death Of A Revolutionary

2024

acrylic on linen

100 x 120 cm

While such events punctuate Shin’s memories, they also illuminate key moments of disillusionment. Belonging to a generation that sought to revolutionise South Korean society in the 1980s and 1990s through socialism, though which never materialised, Shin remarks that his memories of the era are defined by remorse:

“A great societal movement, which a revolutionary foments or attempts to foment with belief and conviction, is met with frustration or the fate that leads to demise or murder.”

‘The Death of a Revolutionary’ (2024), therefore, is both historically revealing and deeply personal. The work reflects on specific events while also hinting at the death of a previous self, Shin, as the younger revolutionary.

JAEDON SHIN

Shaman's Tree 3

2024-2025

oil & acrylic on linen

162.2 x 97 cm

 As an artist who lays claim to personal, historical and art historical lineages and legacies, Shin has also sought to dramatise his paintings through the inclusion of text. In ‘Shaman’s Tree 3’ (2024-2025), declarative, capitalised terms including ‘LOVE,’ ‘BETRAYAL,’ ‘REVENGE,’ and ‘REMORSE’ are summary responses that emerged following Shin’s marathon immersion in opera, listening to as many as 150 opera performances, watched back-to-back at night amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019-2020 and broadcast live from ‘The Metropolitan Opera’ in New York City. During his sleep, Shin experienced intense dreams. According to the artist, he “suffered from endless, recurring, and delusional drama that all troubled thoughts would create.”

The painting features jagged white contour lines that make up the centralised pillar. The artist’s attempt to confine the chaos of emotions has rendered the quasi-anthropomorphised tree as a tormented form, not dissimilar to the scapegoat in the Old Testament. Longer passages of text emerge in additional paintings; for instance, in ‘Mixing Memory and Desire’ (2024), lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem, ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) appear:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain

Written in the post-World War One period when disenchantment was palpable, the stanza is partially obscured in Shin’s painting. The artist’s mixing of his memories and desires highlights an autobiographical intent. Akin to ‘The Death of a Revolutionary’ (2024), which reflects a keen visual recollection, Shin retained Eliot’s verse over many years. Etched into his memory since high school, it accompanied Shin even as he once veered from painting, imagining instead a life as a poet when his artistic drive waned.

For Shin, whose roles and responsibilities within the 1980s democracy movement in Korea mostly revolved around writing, for manifestos, slogans, and signage, the death of his writer-dream finds its parallels in the death of his former vision—an artist to paint people in plight with realism. A turn toward subtlety, as much as an artistic shrewdness, is also Shin’s consideration for his past. By aestheticising violence, Shin’s work becomes a form of emotional anaesthesia, softening trauma through formal control. Up until the temporary finalisation of the series ‘Temple of Ten Thousand Spirits,’ the artist had mixed in paint his memories of social resistance that led him to sacrifice his youth. With the works exhibited for ‘The Centre Cannot Hold,’ Shin seems to have reached a threshold. Having processed the brutal memories of resistance, the artist gestures toward new artistic departures in abstraction, art history, and language. What remains is not closure, but a reckoning—with memory, with form, and with the quiet after the struggle that still asks if and what art can hold when the centre cannot.

Mark Mingu Cho 

Guest Curator, ACAE Gallery