InterviewWith hairnets and fast food wrappers, Shin Min's sculptures serve up raw look at reality of service work
Artist Shin Min poses next to her sculpture, "Usual Suspects — Minjeong (Hold That Scalp Tight, Don't Let It Fall)," at P21 gallery in Seoul, May 9, where she recently held a solo exhibition, titled "EW! Hair in My Food!" Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk
“Ew! There’s hair in my food!”
It was the kind of shriek that could freeze the air — sharp, accusatory and impossible to ignore. A sound all too familiar to Shin Min, who spent more than a decade clocking in to flip burgers and pour lattes to support herself.
When that dreaded cry pierced the air, it became something more than just about a single strand of hair. Behind the counter, it set off a ripple of unease, a flurry of side-eye glances. And soon, the blame game would begin among the crew.
Was it you? No, I didn’t prepare that order. Well, we’re all wearing hairnets, aren’t we? Roll the CCTV. We’ll find the culprit.
Scenes like these from her day job — thick with exhaustion, tension and surveillance — played on a loop in the back rooms of Shin’s mind. After hours, she gave them form in her art, using the crumpled paper sacks that once contained frozen French fries: sculptures of women laboring in the unforgiving margins of the low-wage service industry, where any toil goes unseen until something goes wrong.
These are the figures Shin brings into the sanitized space of the art world — raw, defiant and wholly unapologetic.
Her installation, titled with a wry wink, “Ew! There is hair in the food!!,” debuted at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong, earning her the inaugural MGM Discoveries Art Prize for its “potent symbolism.” She continued the thread in “Usual Suspects,” a thematically resonant series featured in her recently concluded solo exhibition at P21 gallery in Seoul.
Shin Min's installation, "Ew! There is hair in the food!!," debuted at this year's Art Basel Hong Kong in March, earning her the inaugural MGM Discoveries Art Prize. Courtesy of MGM
Many of Shin’s effigies don black hairnets tied with a ribbon — a uniform accessory common across Asia’s service sectors, where women make up the bulk of the workforce, from restaurants and hospitals to banks, flight crews, wedding halls and even the police.
“In Korea, if you’re born a woman, chances are this is something you’ve worn at least once — a kind of rite of passage when first stepping into society as a working adult,” she told The Korea Times in a recent interview. “So when I began to ask myself what labor under capitalism looked like, the first image that came to mind was the hairnet.”
According to the artist, the moment a hairnet is fastened, the woman beneath it is no longer quite human. She is expected to be antiseptic and efficient, almost like a hairless machine, while also performing a quiet ideal of femininity and agreeableness.
“They’re paid little, yet required to follow endless manuals,” she said. “There are three forbidden phrases in service work: ‘I don’t know,’ ‘No’ and ‘We don’t have that.’ You can never refuse outright. You have to cushion your words with a smile and speak in a high, saccharine tone — what they call a ‘Sol pitch’ — all while staying spotless and keeping every strand of hair tucked away. You’re asked to perform femininity, but never physically show it with your body. It’s impossibly absurd.”
Shin Min's "our prayer — I don't hate my colleague I love I hug I am in solidarity" (2022) / Courtesy of the artist
In a workplace where a single hair from a laborer’s own body is treated as something as offensive as a cockroach, everyone is constantly on edge. Inevitably, that aversion doesn’t stop at the customer — it starts to turn inward, toward one another.
And that takes a serious mental toll.
“One day, I was so overwhelmed by work stress that I went to see a psychiatrist,” she recalled with a bitter smile. “As I sat in the waiting room, there was a woman wearing a hairnet to my left, and another to my right. That really got to me.”
“By bringing attention to such reality in my art, I’m not saying, ‘Just eat the food even if there’s hair in it.’ What I want to ask is — why is it that when a strand of hair, a completely natural part of the human body, ends up in a dish, we react with such disgust? And why does the worker have to apologize so profusely for it?”
Shin Min's "Double Check for Foreign Objects Before the Drink Goes Out" / Courtesy of P21
Installation view of Shin Min's solo exhibition, "EW! Hair in My Food!," at P21 / Courtesy of P21
Guided by this vision, Shin sculpts service laborers as unkempt women twisted in rage — a visceral, darkly humorous rejection of the misogynistic system that demands silent submission.
With no make-up, masks muffling their muttered swears and disheveled hair that seems to move with a will of its own — like insect legs or antennae — her comically unruly effigies embody everything they are forced to repress in the workplace.
To bring them to life, she scoured empty paper bags after clocking out, which once held frozen fries and other processed food, because the material evoked the flesh of her fellow workers.
“Staring at those grease-soaked sacks every day, they started to feel like our grimy, sweat-drenched skin,” she said. “And because they’re discarded in bulk, day after day, they reminded me of how disposable labor has become.”
Shin Min sculpts service laborers as unkempt women twisted in rage — a visceral, darkly humorous rejection of the misogynistic system that demands silent submission. Courtesy of P21
Over the years, some critics have dismissed her sculptures as “lacking artistic depth and nuance.” But Shin says she has no interest in hiding behind ambiguous metaphors or esoteric theory. She wants her art to be direct, visceral — something that strikes a nerve.
“When I think about who I want to share my work with, I think of people who can’t make it to museums or galleries,” she noted. “Those without easy access to such spaces, or who are working during the hours they’re open.”
She hopes that even a fleeting image of one of her effigies on social media might resonate like a meme, but with weight.
Reaching everyday viewers in this way feels sacred to her. Inside each figure, she embeds handwritten prayers and wishes — small scraps of longing taped into their hollow bodies, carrying hopes that the injustices she’s witnessed might one day change.
It’s her own quiet form of protest.
Shin Min poses next to her sculpture, "Usual Suspects — Minjeong (Hold That Scalp Tight, Don't Let It Fall)," at P21 in Seoul, May 9. Korea Times photo by Choi Won-suk
With her solo exhibition in Seoul having wrapped up, Shin is now busy preparing for her first show in Macao this summer, presented as part of her MGM Discoveries Art Prize win.
The artist also offered a glimpse into the next unlikely object she hopes to sculpt into meaning: the commercial ice machine.
“If the hairnet was my first brush with capitalism,” she said, “then the ice machine came next.”
“In cafes and food joints, when a drink comes with ice, its price often goes up. But even those hulking industrial machines can’t churn it out fast enough when customers pour in. Watching that, I couldn’t help but feel like the ice maker was printing money.”
It’s this paradox — how something as weightless and calorie-less as ice can carry such inflated worth — that Shin sees as a metaphor for the hollow mechanics of capitalism she has come to understand.
What form her next work will take remains to be seen, but it promises, once more, to cast light on the overlooked labor with audacity and sculptural wit.