Spring to Life

Kyungmi Shin’s Spring to Life is a stained glass and steel mosaic that pays homage to basketball and Centinela Springs, both life-affirming forces in Los Angeles.

Shin’s art practice combines materials with meaning, uniting different historical images of people and places. She is both a sculptor and painter, and she concentrates on visual stories about memory and identity. She is very interested in the relationship between landscape and the body, so she layers silhouettes or outlines of people, objects, and places over the background or foreground of her compositions. These layers add dimension but also demonstrate that people and ideas move from place to place, even in her work. Shin shows us this movement so that we may consider its effects on our bodies, our thinking, and how we structure our world.

Spring to Life was inspired by Shin’s discovery of Centinela Springs, the long-vanished waterway in South Los Angeles. She brings this spring back into contemporary conversation by connecting it to phenomena that shape our lives today. Once upon a time, the springs fed the Tongva, the native peoples of the Los Angeles area, and today our gathering places feed our need for play and community. Centinela Springs was a natural water feature that nurtured the landscape and her people. By using silhouettes of basketball players, Shin shows us that basketball offers the same community building and joy as the springs did long ago. She uses historic materials like glass and stainless steel to show that the impacts of the springs and of basketball on our communities are long term and for the greater good.

Kyungmi Shin has made public art in communities across the country. She creates art to tell stories that strengthen what we know and how we use that knowledge for our collective well-being and imagination. Spring to Life reminds us that ordinary things can tell important stories about our past, present, and future in extraordinary ways.

—Jill Moniz, founder, Transformative Arts

Through painting, sculpture, photography, and video, Kyungmi Shin (b. 1963, Busan, S. Korea) investigates the narratives of global culture — colonization, immigration, and cultural exchange. Working frequently in large-scale photo collage, Shin explores the mechanisms of global connectedness, both the literal and the imagined. She has been a Californian since her family immigrated to LA when she was 19, so her awareness of cultural collision is both acute and personal. In her collages she layers images of Asian and Western culture, juxtaposing the historic with the contemporary, the personal with the universal. For her public artworks, Shin practices “listening to and learning from” the site itself, to reveal its history and its meaning.