Perrotin Los Angeles is pleased to present My Fantasy’s Burdens, Kyungmi Shin’s debut exhibition with the gallery. Featuring both paintings and ceramics, the exhibition builds on Shin’s practice of interrogating Asian-American diasporic identity, drawing on a rich array of sources to foreground the cultural, economic, and scientific legacies of colonial trade.

Kyungmi Shin’s paintings are not simply paintings. They are accumulations—of photography and collage, image transfer and found objects, pigments and metallic gilt lines—compiled, fragmented, and staggered into dense, textured surfaces whose layered depths reward sustained looking. Executed on wood panels or vintage wallpaper fabrics printed with Rococo-inspired motifs (in patterns characteristic of the style’s exotic ornamentation), each work folds centuriesof colonial global exchange—botanical, commercial, spiritual, bodily—into a single, vividly-colored picture plane that unfolds across multiple times and spaces at once.

At the heart of her solo exhibition My Fantasy’s Burdens—the title draws inspiration from poet Natalie Diaz’s "Postcolonial Love Poem"—is a significant shift in source material. Moving away from her family archive, Shin turns to USC’s Korean American Digital Archive, transitioning from personal history to collective memory. Black-and-white images of Korean Americans are photo-transferred directly onto clear-gessoed vintage chinoiserie textile wallpaper, producing a translucent, shadowy ground: ancestors rising through layers of orientalist ornament, invited into the picture as protagonists and storytellers. Highly stylized leaves and flowers, along with Korean shaman talismans, are hand-painted over these layers, generating friction between photographic record and painterly imagination, compressed into a visual kaleidoscope of soft pinks, greens, yellows, and blues: the chromatic regime of chinoiserie—the ultimate “racial ornamentalism”—that became popular during the Rococo period, expressing both European taste for Chinese imports of silk, porcelain, and furniture, and the fashionable distorted imitation of Chinese designs. In her synthesis of photo-based media, collage, and painting, Shin enters into dialogue with artists such as Lorna Simpson, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Robert Rauschenberg, whose practices bring found and photographic images into continuous relation with painted surfaces—merging the indexical and the gestural to reconfigure memory and representation.