For the 2025 edition of EXPO Chicago, PATRON is proud to exhibit a solo presentation with Chicago-based artist Soo Shin. 

Shin’s conceptual, sculptural practice examines universal experiences of displacement, connection, and belonging, often using the perimeters and gestures of her own body to realize abstract ideas of distance and place. Originally from South Korea, Shin draws upon her personal journey of migration and connectedness, to inform a materially driven, poetic sculptural practice. Utilizing ceramic, brass, concrete, wood, seawater, and other materials drawn from personal experience, Shin has developed a visual vocabulary that connects what is deeply human to the natural world. 

For EXPO, PATRON presents an installation of recent works on paper and sculpture developed in the past year, reflecting Shin’s ongoing poetic and physical engagement with the Pacific Ocean, the intermedial body between her South Korean homeland and present land of residence, as both material and collaborator. Since 2023, Shin has received containers of ocean water sourced and sent by loved ones on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, that she then utilizes as a final glaze on her stoneware vessels, leaving a trace of the salt and minerals in the clay. Marking the diameter of the artist’s own encircled arms, and the imprints of her hands, Holding Distance collapses into the physical body the unfathomable distance between loved ones—a meditation on longing and communion across space. 

This presentation marks the Chicago debut of Shin’s suite of works on paper, Pas de Deux, developed during her time at the Djerassi Artist Residency near Half Moon Bay, California. In Pas de Deux, gestures of indigo pigment on sheets of printmaking paper mark the rhythmic movement of ocean waves ebbing and flowing along the Pacific coastline. An ongoing series, Pas de Deux is indicative of the artist’s dynamic connection to her materials, an engagement with the ocean itself as a repository of individual and communal narratives but also a temporal bridge, weaving connections across disparate moments and experiences. The presentation culminates in a grouping of new sculptural works, cast as bronze from the artist’s own feet. Installed in a reflecting pool of Pacific Ocean water, the sculptures within this installation reanimate Shin’s natural materials, creating a tender physical relationship of distance and kinship between artwork and viewer.