Shin Sung Hy:Beyond the Painted Plane

First definitive monograph of Korean-French artist Shin Sung Hy whose legacy has reshaped the global history of abstraction.

Shin Sung Hy’s oeuvre stands at the crossroads of Korea and France, tradition and revolution, surface and body. Published to coincide with his Paris museum solo exhibition, this volume traces the artist’s relentless effort to liberate painting from the flatness of the canvas. From early color and surface explorations to the structural interventions of his final Nouage works, Shin systematically challenged the limitations of the painted plane.

Situating his practice within Korean postwar abstraction and global trajectories of expanded painting, Shin Sung Hy’s Paintings maps the evolution of an artist whose innovations redefined the relationship between pigment, material, and space. Across the decades Shin used textured jute and vibrantly knotted canvases to push color into motion, surface into structure, and gesture into space. This first monograph offers a long-overdue recognition of an artist whose legacy has reshaped the global history of abstraction. | Yeon Shim Chung is a professor in the Department of Art Studies at Hongik University and holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She previously served as co-curator of the 2018 Gwangju Biennale. Maël Bellec is Chief Curator at Musée Cernuschi (Paris), where he heads the Chinese and Korean collections. A specialist in Asian art, he curates exhibitions, contributes to scholarly catalogues, and lectures internationally.