Shen Xin's Brine Lake (A New Body) video installation explores statelessness for Gwangju Biennale

Shen Xin's five-channel video installation Brine Lake (A New Body) (2020) examines statelessness in East Asia through a fictional business meeting at an iodine recycling factory. The work features two female actors performing a script written by the artist and translated into Korean, Japanese, and Russian, presented against an empty black set with English subtitles. Factory employees remain unseen, their dialogue censored, creating an absent presence that viewers must interpret. The narrative subtly addresses Korea's history of conflict and colonization, referencing Sakhalin island where Korean laborers became stateless after World War II. Shen's research into conditions of statelessness informs the work, which avoids overt nationalist histories. The installation was scheduled for the Gwangju Biennale, postponed to 2021, with completion expected by late October 2020. Previous work Commerce des Esprits (2018) similarly engaged with translation and memory through a four-channel video structure combining animated text, Chinese voiceover, and motion-capture video referencing the artist's father's death and Daoist texts. The pandemic context influenced the artist's reflections on communication technologies and perception of reality.