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Conclusions

Pushing experience to its outer limits, Zarina's austere, abstract mappings of home and Shin's skeletal residues of collective experience rub
against the grain of popular models of migration and national belonging. Both resist stock narratives of immigration that depend upon a tear-filled departure from and subsequent nostalgic longing for a "homeland." Such models invent the migrant experience primarily as a linear and chronological trajectory, assuming that the diasporic subject leaves her place of origin and progresses to attain comfort and belonging within a new nation. The artists' work likewise deconstructs and reimagines traditionally feminized spaces and objects, such as women's dresses or the domestic sphere. It highlights the uncanny
character of experience, wherein the very familiarity of a thing or place is exactly what produces its sense of displacement. Both artists come to terms with how a project of representing experience is in itself an already-comprimised endeavor. Fragmentation and potential disintegration thus
lurk at the periphery of every moment.

This is a world in which objects and marks speak using familiar signs to create an intricate language and internal logic that reveal the impossibility of recuperating that past. The deconstructive drive of Shin's and Zarina's work is reflected in their art processes. Whether ripping apart shoes or chiseling away wood, both artists enact the active compression and reduction of experience in their physical labor. Prints, replicated over and over, are arranged in series; hundreds of ossified pant-legs cluster around one another. Using formal strategies of multiples and repetition, these works unsettle the idea of unified reality.


top: Jean Shin, Chance City (2001); bottom: Worn Soles (2001)
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