Curator’s Note: A Pig Walks into a Bar . . .

Excerpt:

While preparing for THE BIG NUDES, Heji Shin called me and confidently announced, “It’s going to be pigs.” You can imagine my moment of hesitation. But moving past that, I knew there was something simultaneously amusing and unsettling about the idea. Shin’s vision has always been directed toward pushing boundaries, making the familiar suddenly strange, and forcing us to reconsider how we engage with images. In many ways, Shin’s pigs are the perfect extension of what Helmut Newton was doing with the female body in his Big Nudes series (Shin’s inspiration for the show), where the unexpected subject leads the viewer to question everything. 

Shin’s exhibition was built around two major bodies of work, positioned in dialogue with each other in fascinating ways. First, richly rendered in both color and black-and-white, are Shin’s oversize, glossy photographs of pigs posed like fashion models. They recline seductively, arching their bodies in ways that immediately recall the famous poses of Newton’s Big Nudes. The way Shin plays with the language of the fashion industry—the lighting, the slickness, the sense of allure—and applies it to these animals is deeply provocative. The pigs are cute, funny, strange, and disquieting, with uncannily human-like bodies and skin. By taking on the subject of pigs, Shin invites us to come to our own conclusions and question why we’re conditioned to respond to certain visual cues the way we do.

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