Heji Shin’s Majestic Portraits of Porcine Princes

The models in Heji Shin’s new exhibition, The Big Nudes at 52 Walker, are probably all dead now. The photographs of pigs from an upstate New York meat farm capture the chubby mammals playfully at ease, unaware of their impending slaughter. Butch (2023) shows a pig with a sweet, almost human grin; the dainty poser in Derek (2023) could be auditioning for a remake of the movie, Babe. The animals’ human-like gestures are not coincidental: they pay homage to Helmut Newton’s 1981-dated photography book and Paris exhibition, Big Nudes, which showed naked women posing in grandiose postures.

The deceiving wrapping of warmth over a rather hard-hitting punchline is not an unfamiliar trait in Shin’s photographic work. The New York-based, Korean-German artist summons beauty, innocence, or sensuality to push the viewer into contemplating disgust, brutality or sometimes simply sex; in other cases, she does the opposite by presenting the normalcy of the gruesome. Shin entered the world of fine art photography (after building a successful career as a fashion photographer) with her series Baby (2016) by doing the latter: the blood-drenched images of newborns fresh out of the womb were purely real, but their raw immediacy caused a stir at the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

In 2018, Shin cast Kanye West for a series of portraits around the time the rapper was beginning to gain notoriety for his remarks on race and politics. The same year, she also photographed a group of hunky men in NYPD outfits for images that captured them during steamy gay sex. Before photographing pigs at a Brooklyn studio for her current show, Shin did a similar shoot with monkeys, snapping the furry animals playing with random objects, from money-filled wallets to dildos. 

Shin’s current show at the Tribeca gallery also includes images of her own brain’s X-Rays rendered with an MRI examination technique called diffusion tensor imaging. In tandem with her stripping shots of others – celebrities or animals – the scans expose the artist’s intellectual inner workings through the cold technicality of medicine and the familiar foreignness of looking at someone’s brain scan. Akin to nudes, they too reveal the very depths of a body’s intelligence, similar to how the pig portraits unrobe our convoluted notions of mercy, sympathy, and love. 

Below, in her own words, Heji Shin talks about the genesis of her latest exhibition, The Big Nudes.

“Fashion photography is about a conventional perception of beauty, which is of course a reality that you can bend endlessly. With fine art photography, it is less about a beautiful photograph. There is of course the good picture that makes you say ‘this makes sense.’ But, overall, I don’t think necessarily in terms of beauty.

“There is an unpredictability in working with animals, similar to working with children or babies. What you get at the end may not feel as authentic or real for the right moment. You cannot control them which means there is more work to do during the edit. There is a lot of chaotic energy. I don’t necessarily like to be in complete control of what I am doing, so on some occasions I just need to let things happen.

“The brain scans are some sort of self-portrait, but they are not intimate. They are abstract and not personalised. A good portrait is considered to be something close to the surface where some emotions are represented. A brain scan, however, is entirely a technical process and it doesn’t deliver anything about the person – it is full abstraction. My brain scans are really not intimate portraits. They have a universal language but as a subject, I don’t deliver anything. This is more of an illusion of a self-portrait.

“When you look through the camera, it automatically disconnects you from the environment. Any other element from your surroundings disappears when things are going well and when you feel focused. On the other hand, photographing outside of the studio is often a challenge, perhaps comparable to the unpredictability of photographing animals. The studio also gives more concentration to the model and allows them to be freer.

“My editorial work has impacted my fine art practice in terms of logistics and showing me how I can professionally approach a project. Fashion photography is much more focused on the model and the clothes so I don’t have to think as much about what I actually want to say. Of course, there is a conceptual approach, but the dialogue is more about the model and the clothes. Fashion photography taught me how to be a little bit more practical and a little bit more professional.”

The Big Nudes by Heji Shin is on show at 52 Walker in New York until 7 October 2023.