Opposites Attract

Drops of rain accumulate in the sky, and gusts of wind send waves spraying wet droplets into the sky as Heji Shin crouches down to focus her camera on the foamy ocean. Hurricane Milton is on the horizon, and the artist is  in Cape Canaveral, Florida to capture its prelude. 

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“They had to cancel the rocket launches,” Shin recalls, alluding to the original reason for her trip to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The fact that the hurricane’s build-up was sending waves spinning into optimal scenes was serendipitous for the artist who had envisioned a series of horizontal images of waves and vertical scenes of rockets.

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Now on view at her exhibition at Aspen Art Museum in “Heji Shin's America: Part One,” the contrasts between these two subjects expand beyond the aesthetic. “There's something hinting at a deeper, primal force trying to break through,” says Shin. In one such image, Polaris Dawn 2, 2024, the rocket appears cosmic—its flash reflects on the still ocean, and exhaust cascades in an arch in the sky. 

The exhibition is an introspective one. “There's so many classical associations regarding America,” says Shin, who was born in South Korea, raised in Germany, and is now based in New York City. “On top of that, there are a lot of ideological ones and political ones. I was deliberately not going into these approaches. I try to do it with elemental images—for me it was a primordial representation of opposites.” The topic is a fitting theme for her first institutional solo exhibition in the United States. When she proposed this idea of a show about America, she was met with a suggestion: A road trip across the country. “Like a modern-day Odyssey,” she says. She set out to do just that.

“After the first weeks, I found that if I did exactly that, I would need a year to photograph and then draw something out of it that would make sense,” she says. So she pivoted to an idea that took her to the crux. This proclivity for getting to the heart of an experience is echoed throughout the artist’s practice. When Shin set out to photograph couples for an 2017 Eckhaus Latta campaign, she initially devised the concept of following them around through their day-to-day but this idea soon evolved to photographing them in the heat of the moment, mid-intercourse.

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So Shin spent months photographing the rocket launches over the summer as a member of the press corps. There, she joined a community of amateur and professional photographers, mostly male, who would wait to document launches from NASA, SpaceX, and smaller companies.

When she wasn’t preparing for take off, she would wander the coast and take photographs of the sea with paintings of waves crashing against rocks by Winslow Homer in mind. Shin would begin preparing for these shots three days in advance, waiting for the moment, finding the right view point, and adjusting her camera settings. Though the image itself would happen in a matter of seconds, the resulting works symbolize many things at once: violence the pursuit of knowledge, colonial expansion, fantasy. Far up in the sky, it appears quite small and permanent as if it is frozen in the sky, but in person it becomes its opposite in many ways: it is massive and gone in a flash.

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“As humans, even as we create something that's so technologically advanced and so detached from us, we still return to things that like us or our fantasies,” I observe. Shin agrees, “Even the electrical circuits look like veins in the body… We may think that we're outside of nature, but when you look at art or when you look at science you find these resemblances.”

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The rocket can appear phallic or look like sperm (as in Polaris Dawn 1, detail, 2024), imbued with a masculinity that recalls Shin’s earlier photos of Kanye West circa his infamous breakdown or close-ups of feral, fighting roosters. Shin sees this, of course, but is careful to note that this is only one layer: "There's a wide range of a representation,” she says, “the phallic force, industrial society, a human-made world contrasting with a more chaotic, intuitive force of nature.” 

Shin has documented these tensions, these moments of emergence and rupture throughout her practice, like her 2016 series “Baby,” in which she captured newborns the instant they emerged into the world. “Why would that be more provocative than a rocket launching into the sky?” I ask. “I don’t think these images would necessarily be provocative for a grounded person who's not ideologically obsessed,” she answers.

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Watching these rockets take off into space and then grounding the images, grounding the show with images that are so tethered to like the ocean to the ground to what's below in that idea that like no matter how much, you know, you strive to that what we can really experience as humans beyond that is what's like immediately in front of us.

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There's propaganda here as well. “You could easily see a different image of a rocket being put on a billboard to say, ‘Look how great our country is,’ I offer to Shin, who while being incredibly curious about the state of the world, is hesitant to speak on the record. “What I really notice is that it's a place of extremes in so many ways,” she replies, “this society within this really powerful, natural place. You have these two forces in the show, and that tension emanates from a place like America.”

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"Heji Shin's America: Part One" is on view until March 2, 2025 at Aspen Art Museum at 637 E Hyman Ave, Aspen, Colorado, 81611.