My Garden / Head 8

A 2012 work from the Head sub-series of My Garden, in which a frontal or near-frontal head is presented as a botanical specimen — body and garden conflated as a single cultivated terrain. Like the earlier Heart & Succulent, it combines water-based mokuhanga, digital print, hand-cut rubber stamps, and embroidery on Korean hemp; the multi-process layering allows different image registers — precise, photographic, gestural, tactile — to sit on a single ground. The number 8 indicates its place within an extended sequence, suggesting Shin worked through the head motif iteratively, varying ornament, scale, or palette across each iteration in the manner of a printmaker's edition logic applied to a serial subject. The Head works extend her interest in anatomical fragments — heart, lungs, womb — to include the head as another vessel of feminine experience and inheritance. The hemp ground, coarser than the washi of traditional ukiyo-e, provides the structural integrity needed to carry both inked and stitched surfaces simultaneously.