My Garden / Head 8
by Ema Shin
- Date:
- 2012
- Medium:
- Japanese woodblock print, water-based pigment, digital print, hand-cut rubber stamp, embroidery on Korean hemp
- Dimensions:
- 34.5 × 70 cm
- Image courtesy of
- Artist's official site
by Ema Shin
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](/glossary/washi) of traditional [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e), provides the structural integrity needed to carry both inked and stitched surfaces simultaneously.
![[Garden of] Taj Mahal, No. 1 (Taji Maharu no niwa, dai ichi) by Hiroshi Yoshida](https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/230993a7-d4f0-c979-c267-127d48e1ef1c/full/843,/0/default.jpg)
Taji Maharu no niwa, dai ichi
1931
Color woodblock print; oban
January 1938
Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
1938
Color woodblock print; oban
10/70, 1966
Woodblock print
My Garden / Head 8 was created by Ema Shin in 2012.
My Garden / Head 8 depicts gardens.
My Garden / Head 8 measures 34.5 × 70 cm.
