Ema Shin

Ema Shin is a Melbourne-based, Niigata-born artist whose practice ranges across Japanese woodblock printing, embroidery, papier-mâché, tapestry weaving, bookmaking, urauchi (chine-collé), and collage. Her work is unified by a sustained interest in tactile materiality, historical women's craft traditions, and the body — particularly anatomical motifs (hearts, lungs, wombs, pelvic bones) presented as vessels of feminine experience and inheritance.

Shin trained as a printmaker in Japan, completing undergraduate studies at Tama Art University in Tokyo, where she studied traditional and contemporary Japanese woodblock processes, and then a Master of Fine Arts at Aichi Prefectural University of the Arts in Nagoya. Self-taught as an embroiderer from childhood, she developed her tapestry practice after relocating to Melbourne, undertaking an Artist-in-Residence position at the Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW) in 2012. Her ongoing collaboration with the ATW culminated in the 2026 commission Hearts of Absent Women #12, a hand-woven tapestry soft sculpture co-woven with master weaver Saffron Gordon for the 25th Biennale of Sydney.

Her printmaking output is most concentrated in the My Garden series (begun 2010), a body of multimedia works built on a Japanese woodblock-printed substrate. Each sheet combines mokuhanga in water-based pigment with digital print, hand-cut rubber stamping, and surface embroidery on Korean hemp; the imagery — Heart & Succulent, Head 7, Head 8, Head 10, Hand 3, Hand 5 — fuses anatomical illustration with botanical and floral overlays. The series typifies her approach of using the woodblock as one technical layer within a larger embroidered, collaged, mixed-media surface rather than as a standalone print.

A second print-derived body of work is the Maternal Garden series (2018), in which papier-mâché sculptural forms are surfaced with woodblock-printed and stamp-printed patterning together with hand embroidery. The Devoted Body installation (2017–18), shown at the 3rd Tamworth Textile Triennial, was made in collaboration with twenty-two embroidery artists from Tamworth, NSW, and demonstrates her use of community-based making as a structural part of her practice.

Shin's more recent and most widely circulated works include the soft-sculpture Hearts of Absent Women series (2021 onward), the Soft Alchemy tapestry series (Lily 2017, Rose Lungs 2016, Tree Girl 2016, Fertile Heart 2019, My Pelvic Bone 2018, Womb For Everyone 2022), and the Resettled Body monumental installation (2024–25, 245 × 111 × 10 cm). She is represented commercially by Gallerysmith in Melbourne; her Soft Alchemy and Hearts of Absent Women series are held by Australian collectors and have been included in tapestry-and-textile-focused group exhibitions including Open House (Tamworth Textile Triennial).

Within the contemporary mokuhanga and Australian printmaking communities Shin is best understood as a hybrid practitioner — formally trained in Japanese woodblock and committed to its visual and material vocabulary, but extending it through embroidery, sculpture, and tapestry into work that is fundamentally interdisciplinary. The 25th Biennale of Sydney commission marks her as one of the most prominent diasporic Japanese-Australian artists working in the textile-print-sculpture continuum.