Jean Shon

Bleed frames Jean Shon’s practice through material acts of transmission, where memory is carried not through clarity or completion but through stain, residue, and absence. The works in this exhibition foreground paper, text, and trace as sites where personal and collective histories quietly surface. Rather than offering legible narratives, Shon presents memory as something that seeps, fades, and persists beyond the boundaries of documentation.

Shon’s work lingers at the edge of what can be read or fully recovered. Marked surfaces, faint inscriptions, and discoloration function as evidence of contact and time, suggesting histories that have passed through the material without fully settling into view. As a second-generation daughter, designated memorykeeper, and family link; Shon navigates inherited responsibility, obligation, and care by working with fragments that resist completion. These materials operate as vessels, holding the pressure of what is remembered and what remains unreachable.

The works do not attempt restoration or preservation in a traditional archival sense. Instead, they propose an intimate, speculative archive shaped by proximity and attention. Through subtle acts of restraint and erasure, Shon allows the material to speak through what it withholds as much as what it reveals. Memory here is not fixed or resolved, but permeable and ongoing, shaped by emotional inheritance and the quiet labor of carrying forward what cannot be fully named.