EMA SHIN’S : HEARTS OF ABSENT WOMEN (TREE OF FAMILY) 2026 : THE SHAPE OF THE ABSENT : EXHIBITED AS PART OF THE 25TH BIENNALE OF SYDNEY

Above photo : Japanese born and Korean raised artist Ema Shin whose work is being exhibited as part of the 25th Biennale of Sydney

On 10 March, I attended the official media preview of the 25th Biennale of Sydney. Over the course of a single day, I moved between five exhibition venues, from central Sydney to the city’s farther western sites, taking in a large number of works. The experience was dense, emotionally charged, and constantly shifting – attention pulled in one direction, then another, interrupted and reassembled from one space to the next. Yet after all of this, Ema Shin’s Hearts of Absent Women remained with unusual clarity. It was one of the works that moved me most deeply in this Biennale.

What first struck me was not the concept, but something more immediate: intuition. Suspended in the centre of the gallery, the large heart sewn in red and white was vivid, soft, and elaborate, like an organ released from anatomy. Standing before it, one is first drawn into its redness. But it is not simply heart-like. It is itself a manifestation of feeling, a form stitched into being by hand, by time, and by memory.

It is so soft, and yet it carries such weight.

That beginning mattered to me very much.

When I spoke with Ema Shin about the origins of the work, she told me that it was dedicated to women who had gone unrecognised in the past. Born in Japan and raised in a traditional Korean family, she grew up with a grandfather who treasured a genealogy tracing thirty-two generations of the family line. Yet the record included only the names of male descendants and of women who gave birth to sons; daughters themselves were left out. From that absence, she has created these hearts through embroidery, handwoven tapestry, and papier-mâché, in order to honour those women who existed in silence but were never written into history. They sustained domestic life, cared for others, held daily life together, and yet so often left behind no names. From the record that remains, it is almost as though they had never existed at all.

What makes the work unforgettable is not any grand scale. On the contrary, it is unforgettable because it is so specific. A family genealogy. An omission. A name never written down. So often, the works with the greatest force do not begin with grand narratives. They begin with something acutely specific, painfully personal, almost small enough to be overlooked. Then, slowly, they grow. They grow into something that can touch many people.

This, for me, is where Hearts of Absent Women becomes so affecting. It gives absence a visible form.

The women who were absent from the family record, and those whose presence there depended only on having given birth to sons, are no longer merely background in this work. They have shape. They have volume. They have weight. They have a heartbeat.

They have been called back.

As I spoke with Shin, I found myself carrying a rather complicated feeling. She herself was very light, very gentle. Not gentle in any superficial sense, but in a way that felt entirely unguarded – an unembarrassed sensitivity. In an age that is becoming colder, faster, and increasingly technologised, that kind of sensibility can seem almost out of time, even slightly at odds with the world around it. And perhaps for that very reason, it felt all the more moving.

As we spoke, she softly wiped away tears and murmured, several times, “sorry,” “excuse me.” And in that moment I saw the slight shimmer of tears at the corner of her eyes. Very fine, very light – and suddenly I thought of the white pearls scattered across her work. They were no longer simply decorative details. They felt like tears, like traces left in long silence by women who had no names, yet unquestionably lived.

In that moment, I felt touched by a life experience many women know intimately.

Because this was not merely politeness. It was something many women know too well: apologising before properly introducing oneself; drawing back a little before fully occupying someone else’s space; saying sorry before one has even finished speaking. There is courtesy in that, certainly, and restraint. But deeper than that lies a specifically female experience, shaped through long habits of cultural discipline and expectation.

This work is very soft.

But it is not weak in the least.

It is, of course, deeply feminine – both in colour and in material. Rose, pink, milky white. Beads, ribbons, embroidery, lace, fibre. It mobilises almost an entire tactile language associated with femininity. Standing before it, one feels delicacy, tenderness, warmth, even intimacy. One can almost hear the heart beating.

But to stop there is not yet to enter the work fully.

What truly held my attention was its internal structure, and the toughness within it. Those deep red forms, like veins and also like roots, extend outward through the work’s body in sharp contrast to the pale ground of the heart. They are not surface ornament. They are support. They are what allow the whole work to stand.

That, precisely, is the key to the piece.

Women’s art is often misread. The moment fibre, embroidery, beads, or soft materials appear, the work is too quickly placed into categories such as the delicate, the decorative, or the feminine. But a truly strong work does not stop at beauty. It must have a resilient structure. Shin’s work does. Those red forms—suggesting at once blood vessels and plant roots fused together—make the work more than beautiful. They give it a force that grows outward while also rooting inward.

As a woman artist myself, I feel this very deeply. I know that for a woman to create work of real significance, and to bring it fully into public view – to have it seen, felt, and recognized – means breaking through many conventions and enduring trials beyond the ordinary. There is bodily depletion, mental solitude, fractured time, financial pressure, and the constant reality of being pulled between family, society, and cultural expectation. A woman artist often needs a formidable inner strength. Not the kind of strength loudly declared. Not a performance of anger. But a strength that continues after hesitation, after obstruction, after repeated resistance.

A strength that has been wounded, and still keeps stitching.

So when I look at Shin’s work, I see its profoundly soft qualities: the pearls, the ribbons, the lace, the almost excessive delicacy of its feminine language. But I also see, very clearly, the harder thing that holds all of this up. Not hardness in a visual sense. Hardness of spirit. Hardness of structure. The kind of hardness a woman artist must possess in order to carry her work through layers of resistance and finally into the world.

What is most moving about the work is precisely the coexistence of these two qualities.

There is one further detail I cannot forget. The white pearls and red ribbons dispersed across the surface of the work – so many that they seem almost to spill over – made me think of countless unnamed women. Seen one by one, they are too small, too quiet, too easily lost in the crowd and forgotten. But gathered together, they suddenly form a presence that can no longer be ignored. They are no longer merely background or embellishment, no longer just the silent trace of handwork. They are gathered, presented, and finally seen, felt, and remembered.

They, too, are part of history.

In this Biennale, titled Rememory, I encountered many works about the present age: works concerned with technology, politics, systems, and global realities. Some were powerful, some incisive, some formally complete. But Hearts of Absent Women made me stop for another reason. Not because it was the loudest work in the room, but because it touched something more enduring: the lived experience of women whose lives have long remained quiet, yet have never truly disappeared. It gives shape back to those names that were never written down, and in doing so returns them to the memory of the viewer.