I thought Hong Gyu Shin was one of the most interesting figures in the New York art scene even before I was sitting at his dining table, looking at his newly acquired Van Gogh. The small canvas, Head of a Peasant, painted in 1885, depicts a woman in profile with her hair gathered up into a dark hat. In Shin’s crowded hang, it shares wall space with a wildly varied range of artists, including the 1980s street artist Richard Hambleton, a peer of Basquiat and Haring whose two “Shadowman” figures loom like apparitions overhead.
Anyone with deep enough pockets can buy a Van Gogh. But few Van Goghs go on to join such eclectic company. Shin, the South Korean-born proprietor of Shin Gallery on New York’s Lower East Side, snapped this one up last May at Sotheby’s for about half its low estimate of $1.5 million.
His floor-to-ceiling arrangement has the Van Gogh nuzzled below a larger Balthus of a topless redhead from 1947. They hang beside a Sam Francis painting from 1950 that looks as if a late Rothko ate a Joan Mitchell, with a gesturally painted yellow arch peeking out near the bottom of its darkly overpainted expanse. I snap a photo of a graphite drawing by Eugène Delacroix in a gilt frame near the ceiling to send to a friend who admires his journals. A sculpture of hand-carved oak and colored resin by Marisol, Portrait of Willem de Kooning, 1980, sits sentry before it all, incorporating cast copies of her subject’s hands. Shin’s apartment is like an eccentric—and packed—party of artists spanning across centuries.
With continued buzz about a downturn in the market and galleries noticeably retreating into conservatism, I wanted to check in with Shin, who, after starting his gallery in 2013 between his sophomore and junior years of college, has never followed the crowd or faded into the background. (That same year, he bid $100 million on a then-record-setting Francis Bacon triptych at Christie’s. Although he didn’t win it, Shin immediately drew the attention of art-market machers.)
In the gallery’s second year, he staged a show of photographs by the Viennese Actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler and the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, known for his erotic themes. The gallery was made to resemble a massage parlor, garnering coverage in the New York Post with the headline, “Horny guys seeking ‘happy ending’ fooled by fake massage parlor.”
Ten years later, Shin’s project has matured as it remains at the same (now expanded) location, with the main gallery on the first floor and a project space, Shin Haus, which specializes in emerging artists, in the basement. I ask him if it has gotten any easier running a gallery. In fact, the stakes have only gotten higher. “At the start, if I made $5,000 in a month it seemed like a lot of money,” he says. Now, if that were all he made over several months, he would have to close.
When I inquire about his plans for the future, his answer catches me off guard. “My ultimate goal is opening a museum on Mars,” he says. I awkwardly shuffle my notes and write “Mars?” before asking, tentatively, if he is thinking about Mars pre- or post-human occupancy? He delivers his answer, “pre-,” in a manner that is at once charming, hilarious, and dead serious, with an implied obviously.
I first met Shin when fact-checking my New York Times review of his 10-year anniversary show, “Amalgamation,” in 2022. Even then, despite his soft-spoken manner and clean-cut collegiate mien, he struck me as having the attitude of an artist rather than a gallerist or collector. He notes that he generally lives a humble existence, taking the train or riding Citi Bikes to traverse the city. He’s wearing a favorite cardigan he’s had since he was in high school. He spends much of his time in the gallery or surrounded by his collection at home, researching an acquisition or planning a future show. He’s already achieved two of his personal dreams: to own a Picasso and, now, a Van Gogh. He acquired the Picasso, Femme endormie, an oil on canvas from 1933 barely larger than a postcard, during the pandemic.
He kept it by his bedside “so I could look at it at the start of the day and at night before I went to bed," he tells me, adding with a laugh, “We basically slept together.” Then there was an opportunity to sell at a great price. I assume that’s how he bought the Van Gogh, but he corrects me. “My bank account is like, total Buddhism,” he says. If a lot of money comes in, it quickly goes out. “I recently realized that having a lot of money in my bank account wouldn’t make me feel more secure.” Instead, he prioritizes having money only insofar as it helps him realize his projects.
Does Shin think of himself as an artist? “I express my artistic desires and ideas through curation, so each exhibition is, I think, my artwork,” he says. He sees himself as a storyteller who puts artists first: “They’re the ones who change the world."
