jean shin turns fractured korean ceramics into symbols of resilience

fragments become vessels again in jean shin’s installation

At The Green-Wood Cemetery’s newly opened Green-House in New York, artist Jean Shin presents Celadon Landscape, an installation assembled from nearly two tons of broken Korean ceramic shards once discarded by artisans and kilns across Icheon, South Korea. On view until January 17th, 2027, the work transforms fractured remnants into monumental mosaic vessels, approaching repair as an ongoing collective act of care.

‘When cultures wrongly prize perfection over all else, we lose so much of what is truly beautiful — yet flawed — in the lived experience,’ Shin tells designboom. ‘In Celadon Landscape, broken Korean ceramic shards become a metaphor for the diaspora: origins scattered, lineages stretched across distant places. But to gather the broken is an act of remembrance and resilience.’

Originally conceived in 2015 and now reimagined indoors for the first time, the installation shifts attention away from perfected objects toward what is usually rejected in the process of making. The pale celadon fragments, each carrying traces of labor, memory, and imperfection, are pieced together into large-scale vases whose visible seams remain intentionally unresolved. Rather than conceal rupture, Shin preserves it. ‘In assembling these fragments, I am not restoring what was lost — I am making something new from it. The fractures remain visible. And yet, together, they form a landscape of collective belonging — a persistence toward wholeness,’ the artist continues.

ean Shin, Celadon Landscape, 2015/ 2026, Ceramic shards, mortar, and ESP Foam Celadon fragments donated by the City of Icheon, South Korea, and participating kilns in the region Fabricated by Miotto Mosaics Art Studios, Inc. installed at the Green-House, The Green-Wood Cemetery. images by Etienne Frossard

rethinking perfection through collective healing

For the artist, the work draws a connection between broken ceramics and diasporic experience. Shards separated from their original vessels become metaphors for displacement, migration, and fragmented lineage. Yet Celadon Landscape frames gathering, assembling, and holding together as forms of emotional and cultural repair.

The exhibition expands beyond ceramic materiality through a participatory installation unfolding across the gallery walls. Jean Shin invites visitors to write the names of loved ones onto torn mulberry paper printed in celadon tones and patterns derived from the shards themselves. Then, she collages these handwritten contributions onto a growing scroll installation, transforming private remembrance into a communal archive of care.

Jean Shin assembles discarded Korean celadon shards into monumental mosaic vessels

the green-house as a new cultural gateway

Celadon Landscape inaugurates the Green-House, Green-Wood Cemetery’s visitor and exhibition center, built around the restored 1895 Weir Greenhouse in Brooklyn. Designed as an entry point into the cemetery’s 194-hectare historic grounds, the space hosts exhibitions, research facilities, educational programs, and public gatherings centered on memory, ecology, and collective history.

Positioned within Green-Wood’s landscape of mourning and memory, the project considers how absence accumulates meaning over time. What once functioned as upright vessels for gathering and sharing now lies earthbound, reassembled into a horizontal terrain of fragments. Repair is presented as a process of living with visible damage while continuing to build connection around it.

The exhibition also resonates with Shin’s outdoor earthwork Offering, currently on long-term view in Green-Wood’s entrance meadow, where two fallen elder trees have been memorialized through regenerative landscape intervention.

traces of patterns, glazes, and histories embedded within the installation

Celadon Landscape reimagines broken pottery as a collective act of repair and remembrance