Shen Xin

Tina is pleased to present Mink and Berry, a solo exhibition by Shen Xin, featuring a film, three paintings, and a screen-printed text installation. Rooted in the form of a contemporary fable, Mink and Berry simultaneously explores the language and capacity for kinship, and the interdependence between intention and perception, in a shared but fractured world. It unfolds a quiet meditation on the complexities and innate potentials of recognition and belonging.

The exhibition hosts a story of a young mink who, observing the rituals of a human community, attempts to signal its inclusion through symbolic acts. Yet, these gestures are misread. They are met not with understanding but with distance and mistrust, leading to fear, misinterpretation, and violence. As the mink’s efforts to be seen and understood grow more desperate, the community’s response becomes more defensive. A cycle of escalating action ensues, becoming a story at once intimate, mythical, and all too familiar. This narrative, presented as a screen-printed text rendered in ink made from local flora the artist gathered, opens a space for imagining how meaning circulates in uneven terrains. The story, part of a wider children’s publishing initiative with སྲམ་ Dòbhran, offers a fable not only of misunderstanding, but also of the longing to be known and the persistent quest to build meaningful relationships.

The film, Bearing Fruit of Fondness (2025), deepens this enquiry by weaving image, sound, and material into a space of tenderness that considers how place, memory and the body hold onto love even when belonging is withheld. It explores the manifesting expressions that form between mother and child, between land and dweller - languages that resist legibility, yet endure and are deeply felt. Made using 16mm film and hand-processed with cotoneaster leaves, then transferred to 4K, the work features a single-take voice recording of Shen Xin reading a script in Chinese. The script is interspersed with breath and stillness, and recordings of a Southwest storm captured from within the artists' home by AX Archive (the collaborative duo of Shen Xin and Ali Van). Reflecting on ideas of elemental kinship, the film evokes a layered sonic landscape of vulnerability and resilience. Drawing on migratory patterns, mother-child relations, and the invasive and unintegrated abundance of the cotoneaster plant, Bearing Fruit of Fondness (2025) becomes a space where voice and wind, place and presence, body and image coalesce. The film considers how belonging can be reconstructed outside the frameworks of nation and origin, through attunement to rhythm, relation, and the poetics of weather. It is both a return and a becoming, where meaning is not declared but embodied.

The paintings in the exhibition further expand this terrain, illustrating the story of the mink. The gulls, the fulmars, and the hens in the paintings appear in the mink’s story, marking thresholds and sites of passage, return, or ritual. They invite viewers into quiet moments of reflection as they hover somewhere between the natural and the mythological.

The materials used ground the work in Isle of Skye where the artist is based, while gesturing toward broader ecological and social tensions through their relational ecosystems. In a time when misalignment so often becomes conflict, Mink and Berry gently insists on the possibility of another kind of encounter, where symbols don’t merely signal difference, but open the door to cohabitation, care, and shared presence. Rather than mapping disconnection, Shen Xin’s work offers a meditation on the tension between gesture and perception, drawing parallels between ecological fragility and social estrangement. In a time of deep division, this delicately entangled tale considers how meaning is formed, and lost, when languages of survival go unheard. It is an exhibition that grounds what is innate, relational, and the enunciations that settle in states of being, echoing the persistence of kinship and relationship building so present in the film.

Bearing Fruit of Fondness (2025) is also being presented at Collective, Edinburgh from 3 October - 21 December 2025 marking a joint premier of this new work.

The film Bearing Fruit of Fondness contains mentioning of domestic and child abuse, grieving, state violence, and displacement. The paintings in the exhibition contain descriptions of animal cruelty and death.

General audio notes:

The film consists of two main audio components. One is of Shen Xin performing a reading of the script in Chinese in one take, and the sounds of them resting and breathing in between. The reading inherits characteristics of gusts that are heard, for the other is of the sounds of South West storm experienced and recorded from the interior of their home by AX Archive, the collaborative duo of Shen Xin and Ali Van.

Shen Xin (b. 1990, Chengdu, China; lives and works in An t-eilean Sgitheanach (Isle of Skye), Scotland with their life partner and sometime collaborator Ali Van.)

Shen Xin's recent solo exhibitions include but this is the language we met in, Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond (2024); one, arriving at floodplains, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai (2023); Brine Lake (A New Body), M HKA, Antwerp (2023); ས་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་འགྱུར། (The Earth Turned Green), Kunstverein Gartenhaus, Vienna (2023); ས་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་འགྱུར། (The Earth Turned Green), Swiss Institute, New York (2022) and Brine Lake (A New Body), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2022). Recent group shows include 目 Chine, une nouvelle génération d’artistes, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2024); Another Tongue of Mine, Lisson Gallery, Beijing (2024); Poetry by the Barbarian, ASE Foundation, Shanghai (2024); with AX Archive, àirde na gaoithe, EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York (2024); 14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema, Shanghai (2023); 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale: This Too, Is A Map, Seoul (2023); Pixel Row Vol.4 Natural Vicissitude, West Bund Museum, Shanghai (2023); Ghost 2565: Live Without Dead Time, Bangkok (2022); Language is a River, MUMA, Melbourne (2021); The Rearview Landscape, UCCA Dune Art Museum, Hebei (2021) and 13th Gwangju Biennale: Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning, Gwangju (2021).

Shen Xin's work resides in the following Museum collections:

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MIMA, Middlesbrough; The University of Salford Manchester; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; M HKA, Antwerp; Fosun Foundation, Shanghai; How Museum, Shanghai; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; New Century Art Foundation, Beijing; Points Collection, Shanghai; MACA Art Center, Beijing; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Surplus Space, Wuhan; De Ying Foundation, Shanghai and dslcollection, Paris.