Somewhere between the plastic sheen of a Happy Meal toy and the fluorescent buzz of a late shift fryer, Korean artist Shin Min has pulled off something quietly revolutionary. Her prize-winning installation, Ew! There is hair in the food!!, shown with Seoul’s P21 gallery at Art Basel Hong Kong’s Discoveries sector, didn’t just win her the inaugural MGM Discoveries Art Prize. It made the invisible visible, the disposable dignified.
This wasn’t a work built on shock or spectacle. It was a low-wage lament rendered in humble materials: characters folded, crumpled, and resurrected from fast food packaging paper. Shin Min, who once served lattes and flipped burgers for minimum wage, translated the banal rituals of food service into something poetically grotesque—and deeply human.
From Deep Fryer to Fine Art
In a fair teeming with polished conceptualism and photogenic excess, Shin’s work felt like a whispered protest at the back of the room. Her sculptures—strangely elegant, oddly animate—are stitched together from the detritus of service industry life. McDonald’s wrappers, Starbucks cup sleeves, napkins worn thin with grease and guilt.
Each figure seemed to wobble between collapse and defiance, as if exhausted from the double shift of aesthetic performance and economic survival. The title Ew! There is hair in the food!! is a scream of service rage—an echo of every eye-roll, every complaint from the other side of the counter.
But beneath the humor lies critique. Shin’s characters aren’t caricatures. They are avatars of the precariat: the cleaners, the guards, the backroom baristas who, as she pointedly reminded the press, “are also working behind the scenes at Art Basel.”
Why the Jury Took Notice
The MGM Discoveries Art Prize jury praised Shin’s “bold vision” and “potent symbolism.” They could have said “brutally elegant” or “impeccably enraged,” and it would’ve fit. What sets Shin apart is her refusal to exoticize or sentimentalize. She doesn’t paint over the humiliation of low-status labor with artistic gloss. She leans in, picks up the sticky tray, and crafts something that smells faintly of old oil and perseverance.
In a landscape where emerging artists often play to market expectations, Shin delivered a body of work that refused to flatter. Her sculptures work—both literally and metaphorically. They squat. They bend. They slouch with fatigue. They refuse to smile for the collector’s camera.
The Prize, the Platform, the Power Shift
The MGM Discoveries Art Prize—backed by Chinese casino giant MGM China Holdings—is a curious beast. It celebrates “originality” in emerging artists, yet it’s funded by a luxury leisure industry built on performance and invisible labor. Shin’s win doesn’t smooth over this irony. It heightens it.
By placing the tools of the underclass center stage—greasy wrappers, menial routines, and all—she forces the art world to confront the quiet violence of its own support systems. It’s not activism packaged as art. It’s art that activates discomfort.
What Happens Next?
Shin Min’s next exhibition, also titled Ew! There is hair in the food!! opens at P21 in Seoul from April 12 to May 17. The title may stay the same, but the context shifts. Back home, among a city still simmering with generational labor angst, her figures might land with even more resonance.
She’ll also exhibit in Macau, the glitzy epicenter of the very industry funding her rise—a fitting stage for sculptures that speak to exploitation in the shadow of opulence. Shin is no longer behind the counter. She’s behind the curtain now, rearranging the set.