Artist: Soo Shin
Title: Pas de Deux 3.13.24-4 (Pacific Ocean)
Date: 2024
Medium: Ink, Pacific Ocean water, paper
Credit Line: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Block Board of Advisors Endowment Fund purchase

In 2024, Shin began work on Pas de Deux, a series of collaborative and experimental drawings. For these works, she constructed a floating wooden apparatus designed to fit a sheet of thick paper and hold two small wooden balls dipped in indigo ink. Carrying the contraption into the Pacific Ocean, Shin allowed the ebb and flow of the water—and the movement of her own body within it—to guide the pigmented spheres. The balls hopped, jumped, and rolled across the page, tracing the gestures of the waves and creating a drawing with the ocean.

The resulting image reveals both spontaneity and precision: frenetic blue lines zigzag and pool across the surface, while the off-white cotton paper itself bears minuscule grains of sand and subtle buckling from its time submerged in seawater. The white paper reveals the once-wet traces of the Pacific Ocean, and the indigo marks are at times languid and at other points frantic. The poetic interplay between the water and Shin—between nature’s aquatic rhythm and human intervention—is seen in the traces of indigo.

In a sense, Shin made Pas de Deux in collaboration with the Pacific Ocean, with both the artist’s body and the ocean waves guiding the wooden balls across the paper. The work becomes a triumph in experimental mark-making, pushing forward art-historical understandings of what abstraction can express; of what drawing can do and what drawing can be.

In a conversation with the artist, Shin noted that the writings of playwright and theorist Édouard Glissant, in particular Poetics of Relation (1990), shaped her gestural forms. At its core, Poetics of Relation examines how identity is continually constructed through networks and relationships between individual actors and histories of diaspora, migration, and power structures. Glissant underscores the importance of change in a relational understanding of identity in lieu of a “fixed” or rooted one.[i]

Shin’s work, like Glissant’s, also illustrates the “right to opacity”; that not everything about a person or culture can or should necessitate transparency. And it is exactly this notion of boundaries that allows for more expansive readings of Shin’s artistic practice, rather than amplifying her biographic details—that she’s South Korean, that she’s an immigrant, that her work with the ocean is a poetic reference to her own migration journey. While all of these points are factually true and scaffold the artist’s life, the form of Pas de Deux speaks to the push and pull of relational dynamics that are found outside and beyond the immigrant experience. The energetic verve of Pas de Deux lies not in Shin’s Koreanness or Korean-Americanness but in multiculturalism. It transcends one-dimensional identifications such as “Asian American artist” or “artist who is a woman of color.” The rapid frenzy of indigo lines, as well as the space through and between them, suggests how form is a product of multiple vectors made in relation and reaction to one another.

Shin’s work also centers nonhuman, environmental forces as agents of change and direction. Shin’s practice speaks to the varied forms in which we make relationships and the surprising ways in which community takes root—across language, land, water, and time. Her transoceanic practice is materially resonant in Pas de Deux, where the “realities of distance, displacement, yearning, connection, and loss” reverberate and are recorded in indigo pigment across the page. The human and the environment are trying to coexist in a push-pull dance, but one will always win over the other. With each ebb and flow, Pas de Deux serves as an ongoing record of contact improv between us and the oceans. This work speaks to the beyond-human gestures that bear the traces of cultural systems and diasporic bodies in movement.

– Contributed by Stephanie S.E. Lee, 2024–2025 Art History Graduate Fellow

1. [i] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 178.

Pas de Deux 3.13.24-4 (Pacific Ocean) is on view in the exhibition Pouring, Spilling, Bleeding: Helen Frankenthaler and Artists’ Experiments on Paper from September 17 – December 14, 2025.