“If the origin of my work is scandalous, it is because for me, the world is a scandal.” –Hans Bellmer

Shin Gallery in coorperation with Ubu Gallery is pleased to present: In the Mind, Through the Body, a two man exhibition featuring photographs and drawings by a German Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer (1902 - 1975) and a Korean Contemporary artist, Keunmin Lee (b. 1982) on view from July 13 – Sept 3 at 66 Orchard Street.

Diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, Keunmin Lee committed to use his condition as a visionary power and transformed his hallucinations into sources of pure, creative material. By recognizing imperfections and treating them with compassion, Keunmin Lee enables the audience to accept his faults as they naturally are.

Also using his art form as a kind of therapy, Bellmer’s work represents his repressed feelings of frustration and resentment towards his suffocating childhood, his anger towards the police, and his unfulfilled sexual desires. Through obsessively creating dolls that clearly sexualized young girls, Bellmer explored his fetishes and heightened his desire for women. Through the dolls, he attempted to understand life and death by searching for erotic limits, unconscious fears and desires.

Although developed from different mental states, Hans Bellmer and Keunmin Lee uses their artistic practice as their personal therapy and coincidently both frequently use the human body as their subject matter. Furthermore, both of the artists express the human body in a distorted manner, which helps emphasize the fact that their inspiration came from their personal psychological space and not from simple observation of the human anatomy. The limited use of color also helps explain their clear vision as they emphasize only certain artworks and certain areas to represent a mental space that no one else can replicate.