Hanna Shim - Answers To Your Questions: Preview Catalogue

Opening - Saturday 26th July 11am-12.30pm

Sanderson are pleased to announce the new exhibition Answers To Your Questions by Hanna Shim.

Hanna Shim (b.1990 Seoul, Korea) is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Shim completed her Master's degree in Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2015. She has showcased her work in solo exhibitions including Pillow Garden (2024-2025) at the Dowse Art Museum, Wishing You Well (2022) at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, Mother Mother (2021) Splore Arts Festival, Mushroom Room (2020), Grey Lynn window space, Bone Like This (2019) and Lost in Forest (2017) at Whitespace Gallery. Group shows include Embellish (2024) at Sanderson Contemporary with Sung Hwan Bobby Park, Lisa Walker, Josephine Cachemaille, Julia Holderness, Arapeta Hākura and Iza Lozano and Kiss Me, Hardy! (2021), The Suter Art Gallery, Nelson Whakatū.

Exhibition text by Felixe Laing

A swirling dream-stream of hyperfocus, plushy agreeable slogan cushions, and a silver suspended workhorse—welcome to Hanna Shim’s corporate world. Like many artists, Shim makes art while holding down another job. As a full-time office worker, her days are filled with stand-up meetings, small talk, endless emails, and juggling tasks—her evenings are spent unwinding by making art and scrolling through online silly and satirical memes and shorts.

Answers to Your Questions is a departure from Shim’s large scale soft built environments and installations featuring the natural world and the body as featured in recent exhibitions; Pillow Garden (2024–2025) at the Dowse Art Museum and Wishing You Well (2022) at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space. In this series the artist draws from her digital world to reflect on her daily work-life and state of mind. The works, mostly displayed on the wall, read like a scrolling feed of moments, awkward replies, and half-finished thoughts. Each piece captures a moment in her daily rhythm, examining how she navigates a mundane and hectic office environment. Cumulatively, the works act as a series of inner-self portraits, blending her distinct worlds of the workplace and artmaking.

Shim draws inspiration from her favourite and relatable memes, which make light of the banal and time-consuming nature of full-time work. These memes play with imagery, short text and exaggerated positive phrases to create a satirical and intentionally cringey effect. These memes' hyperbolic and deluded tone paired with optimistic Y2K aesthetics sum up Shim’s sense of humour and are cathartic in the face of the pressures of a busy day. In her words, “​​They’re [the meme collection] deeply personal, but the most personal things are probably the most universal, too.” In this series of quilted, tufted and sewn artworks, Shim plays with the format and language of these memes; their flat digital imagery and colours undergo a tactile transformation.

Many of the works which employ this text style including Okay, Yep, Yep, Yep and Good, Good speak more closely to an agreeable and socialised employee. While the tufted works How we juggle and What I’m good at—Overthinking act as more honest windows into the artist's hyperfocused, over-caffeinated state of mind and modern busyness. Shim captures the dizziness of juggling multiple jobs, deadlines, and responsibilities, highlighted with the artist's favourite emoji: the melting face.

Lately, Shim has been drawn to the futuristic yet nostalgic aesthetics of Y2K and has been interested in drawing parallels to contemporary digital culture. This can be seen in the return trends of the overly decorative, maximalist, hyperconsumerist aesthetics which bleed into IRL design and culture within food, fashion and home décor. The Y2K material references to neon and rainbow colours, iconic WordArt fonts, care-free animals, iridescent glitter, plasticky textures, and chrome, have allowed Shim to sculpturally play with the tension of soft and hard in her work. The piece which captures this most expertly is the suspended chrome workhorse, shiny with idealism. Like a solid silver idol or futuristic unicorn-come-racehorse, this figure sets a galloping pace: the personification of blind, hard-working spirit. Paired with the title Trapped, the work softens into a heavy portrait—the performance of the working artist appears optimal and efficient with neon green threads spilling from its seams.

By Felixe Laing, July 2025