At The Green-House at Green-Wood in New York, on view from April 18th, 2026 to January 17th, 2027, Jean Shin presents Celadon Landscape, a large-scale installation that rethinks memory in art through rupture, accumulation, and shared participation. Nearly two tons of discarded Korean ceramic shards are gathered into monumental sculptural vessels, where imperfection becomes both structure and visual language.
Memory in art as fragment, diaspora, and collective remembrance
In Celadon Landscape, memory is treated not as preservation, but as ongoing assembly and repair. Thousands of celadon fragments sourced from ceramic studios in Icheon, South Korea are carefully arranged into two horizontal forms. Their broken edges remain exposed, refusing concealment.
Once part of cups, bowls, and domestic objects, these shards carry traces of use and intention. Reconfigured into new sculptural bodies, they speak to displacement and continuity at once. Shin draws a parallel with diasporic experience: materials separated from origin yet still marked by cultural presence. What is broken does not disappear—it persists through relation, attention, and reassembly.
Ceramic installation as living structure and participatory archive
As a ceramic installation, Celadon Landscape is defined by scale and openness rather than closure. The two vessel-like forms rest on their sides like overturned histories, built from irregular fragments that still retain the muted glow of celadon glaze. Instead of seamless restoration, the work holds fracture in view, allowing seams, gaps, and inconsistencies to remain legible.
The project extends beyond material form into participation. Visitors are invited to respond to the question of who they carry with them, writing names on torn sheets of mulberry paper printed in celadon tones. These fragments are continually assembled by the artist into a growing scroll, forming an evolving collective archive that mirrors the installation’s own logic of dispersion and gathering.
A continuum between loss, renewal, and connection
Shin’s practice often draws from discarded matter—obsolete technologies, everyday remnants, and overlooked objects—reframing them as carriers of shared meaning. In Celadon Landscape, this approach extends into cultural and ecological reflection, where fragmentation becomes a condition for renewed connection rather than finality.
Presented alongside her long-term earthwork Offering at Green-Wood, the exhibition positions memory in art as an ongoing process shaped by time, participation, and accumulated presence.
JEAN SHIN
Celadon Landscape, 2015-2026, Ceramic shards, mortar, and ESP Foam, Installation at the GREEN-HOUSE, THE GREEN-WOOD CEMETERY
Photography by ETIENNE FROSSARD
