TJ Shin. The Vegetarian. 2022. Installation.

TJ Shin’s The Vegetarian derives its name from a 2007 novel by South Korean author Han Kang in which the protagonist slowly transforms into a vegetable after making an unpopular decision amongst her family and society to become a vegetarian. In an interview with Re’al Christian for Art Papers, Shin writes of the protagonist, “Rather than thinking about this act as self-denigration or self-harm, I wanted to think about her as [embodying] this radical refusal to be human.” As an installation, The Vegetarian centers on Shin’s act of introducing their DNA (transfecting) into mugwort, labeled an invasive species in North America, with the help of biologist Solon Morse while on residency at University of Buffalo. This act, captured in fluorescent microscopic animations, dried mugwort leaf prints framed like 16th and 17th century colonial botany preservations, and a scentscape, troubles normative, Western-centric understandings of invasiveness. Inspired by Mel Chen’s term transplantimalities, in which they describe transplant recipients being able to feel their organ donor, Shin’s biological infection of an “infectious” plant that has been at the heart of Malaria vaccines and other forms of healing, is a beautiful queering of transpecies sentience and symbiosis playing out at the limits of magnified site. Its inclusion in the Soft Data/Base derives from its experimental injection of human data (DNA) into nonhuman matter in order to evoke these unquantifiable transpecies sympathies.