Dual Reality: ShinYoung An’s Exhibition in the Hutchins Gallery

Last Thursday, September 14, amidst the hustle and bustle of Club Night, the Hutchins Gallery hosted its first artist this fall,  ShinYoung An. A stunning exhibition defined by exuberant colors and ideas, A Brush with Reality: The Mundane and Disturbing but with Hope premiered in Lawrenceville and has been on display since September 1. The exhibition depicts a lush landscape of art pieces, incorporating themes of news bias and political conflicts that have shaped American and world history. Fascinatingly, the structure and composition of most artworks evolve around a mundane object juxtaposed with a collage of news in the background. These striking juxtapositions emphasize the significance of the media in shaping public perception of important historical events like the Civil Rights Movement, the January 6 Capitol Attack, and the Covid-19 pandemic.  Collages of the news were created from articles published by various media outlets, featuring an intentional selection of ABC News, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, to name a few. Accompanying these distressing news articles are objects used in everyday life. Phone screens, coffee mugs, and cups of ramen noodles drag the viewers back into the normalcy of daily life, confronting the relationship between faraway worlds sequestered on phone screens and the calm, monotonous certainties of the day-to-day. 

One of my favorite pieces is a self-portrait titled “Social Distance,” an oil on canvas painting. What differentiates this painting and makes it immediately stand out from the rest of An’s collection is that it is one of her two self-portraits. Depicting a tilted half-profile of  An with the palm of her hand wiping away the water vapor from a window, the painting simultaneously encapsulates news reports on social distancing, with catching headlines like “Of Social Distancing: from the Middle Ages” and foreboding phrases such as “A Deadly New Contagion” in the background of the painting. The disconnection, isolation, and loss of An’s facial expressions touched me as they profoundly resonated with the sentiments I felt adapting to the void of face-to-face connections and social distancing during the rampage of the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only did I relate to the painting, but I was immediately drawn to the unique and granulated textures of the bubbles of water paper. 

As Chloe Kalna, who chairs the Visual Arts Department, passionately remarks, “students told me that the texture of the bubbles almost made them have the urge to wipe the window alongside the artist.” For me, the remarkable vividity of the bubbles also contributes to building tension between seeing and being seen, especially when situated in the context of the rest of the painting. 

An’s visit attracted faculties and students to the gallery, who voiced different ideas regarding the exhibition. Bernadette Teeley P’24, the Dean of Academics and a teacher in the English Department connects An’s exhibition with how overlapping or differing news outlets displayed in each artwork showcase the role of bias in the narratives we consume daily. When asked how her work interacts with the general Lawrenceville community and the messages she hopes to bring to campus, An wanted to create “tension and dialogue” to highlight juxtapositions of the mundane with the events happening in humanity’s larger reality, instilling a sense of urgency of change in contemporary politics. An speaks of how easy it is to lose sight of what is happening around the world in transitional moments of policy-making, which in turn permeates and shapes the mundane. An warns the larger Lawrenceville community of the danger of indifference and lack of care, inspiring students to engage in all spheres of decision-making and grow into more active and empathetic participants of the community who, as a collective, drive positive changes they want to see in the future generation’s leaders.