Like many people trying to break into the art world, South Korean artist Shin Min has, over the years, taken several part-time jobs to support herself. In the past, she’s worked at McDonald’s and Starbucks and in other low-paid, gruelling service industry positions on the very lowest and most precarious rung of the gleaming corporate ladder. Here, she encountered the entrenched misogyny of this labour – the expectation to conform to passivity and servitude while performing an idealised version of femininity. Some roles further depleted her identity by requiring her to adopt a Western name for the benefit of international customers.

By day, she sweated, toiled and served. By night, she created art borne from the indignation she felt and indignity she endured at work. Initially using the paper sacks leftover from McDonald’s frozen French fries, Shin Min began creating effigies of angry, unruly, unkempt women as a way of renouncing and resisting this regime of compliance and submission. The figures – or ‘dolls’ – are a kind of self-portraiture celebrating all the qualities these jobs required her to suppress.

Titled Ew! There is hair in the food!!, her presentation at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong (represented by Seoul’s P21 gallery) is dominated by one of these dolls – a furious presence presiding over an army of other individual sculptures and busts of unhinged uniformed women contorted in fury, many of whom are wearing hair nets –  a recurring motif throughout Shin Min’s work. Among other things, hair nets represent the imposition of corporate authority on the unruly body – and nature – of women. They are a potent symbol of restraint and repression. She draws our attention to the impossible standards the service sector is subject to and the dehumanising effect of this labour, which, in her experience, is skewed towards the female workforce. 

Today, before Shin Min was distinguished as the recipient of the first-ever prestigious MGM Discoveries Art Prize at Art Basel Hong Kong – an award intended to highlight and support the region’s emerging artistic talent – we sat down at the art fair to talk about her Starbucks employee alter ego, the hardships and humiliations of being a woman working in South Korea’s service industry, her efforts to draw our attention to this prevalent systemic inequality, and what compels her to keep making her dolls.

Please could you introduce us to Semi, the character portrayed in your paper sculptures?

Shin Min: ‘Semi’ is actually the name I used when I was working at Starbucks, because you’re supposed to have an English name. So it represents myself as well as all the women who work in the service industry. It has different meanings, because I didn’t feel I belonged to either the art world or the service industry. I didn’t fit anywhere. I was trying to be an artist, but then I was working during the day at Starbucks – a temporary job. So I was semi.

In Chinese characters, ‘semi’ can mean the beauty in the world, which also gives a very hopeful message. So for me, the word means different things.

How did those experiences working in the service industry inspire your work and also, more broadly, your perspective?

Shin Min: This particular presentation has the title Ew! There is hair in the food!! It’s starting from a scene where a customer finds hair in their food and then files a complaint, and the workers have to deal with this. [Working in the service industry], you get anonymous complaints, but it’s just hair – a natural part of the body. How much closer to perfection are workers expected to be? So that question is the starting point of this presentation, but my work in general is about my experience and the hardship I had to face as a female worker.

The other series is called The Usual Suspects. It’s about the irony that these female workers are expected to deliver this sort of traditional femininity as a nice service worker, but then you have to tie your hair back. So it’s like two opposite things that are expected of you.

As a woman working in the service industry, the three things you are not allowed to say are ‘No’, ‘I don’t know’, and ‘that’s not possible’ – Shin Min

You’re supposed to perform an ideal vision of femininity while also being antiseptic and sanitised like a robot?

Shin Min: Exactly. How can we as female workers deliver everything? Being feminine and just being nice and always just serving people, but at the same time, we’re supposed to control every part of our body as well as our human nature. It’s just ridiculous and impossible.

Being here in Hong Kong, it’s impossible not to think about globalisation and the corporations like Starbucks and McDonald’s we encounter in every city. There is a homogeneity to their presence, but your work also really considers the extent to which they impose homogeneity on their workers.

Shin Min: Yes. And the hair nets symbolise the status they put these female workers in. It’s common in Asia, where we have black hair, to have these black hair nets with a ribbon, whether it’s a restaurant or in the general service industry, including hospitals and the police. Just because we’re women, we are required to wear this and we’re expected to be nice and obedient. As a woman working in the service industry, the three things you are not allowed to say are ‘No’, ‘I don’t know’, and ‘that’s not possible’. You’re supposed to always be positive, say yes, always smile and always apologise. These are the feminine qualities that are expected.

It’s my way of protesting. I’m doing my best by creating these objects and artworks to raise a voice, to raise awareness and connect with people – Shin Min

Do you feel that those pressures and expectations are less on your male counterparts in those jobs?

Shin Min: Yes, definitely. Also, I think customers subconsciously just presume that the women staff are more obedient. They just have to be nicer. I mean, there are fewer men in the industry. More women apply for these low-wage but hard, high-intensity service jobs.

I think women are socialised to be more giving and agreeable, to not show anger. Which I think makes your work even more inspiring, because I love that this self-expression, which feels full of anger and indignation, emerged from that experience.

Shin Min: Some of the figures are wearing masks, but inside the mask, they’re swearing. But they cannot just release that anger in front of the customer. Making them was a way for me to find some way to find consolation. And also, I want other people to find consolation through my work.

It’s kind of a self-care as well as a self-portrait?

Shin Min: Exactly. Each one has a different name and I treat each doll as an individual, But I didn’t want to portray someone in particular, or to generalise or minimise the portrait of a worker, so they are in my image. Every one of them has my face.

What aspects of yourself do they represent?

Shin Min: I’m not the favoured type for the service industry, because they prefer petite and more feminine girls. I don’t put on the make-up, I’m chubby, I’m just unapologetically myself. So, by making these figures after myself, I’m representing my kind.

How did you arrive at this way of working with paper?

Shin Min: I was working at McDonald’s. I had to continuously fry the potatoes and then dump the frozen potatoes, which are all from the US, in the oil. One day I noticed the empty bags looked like my skin, drenched in oil and sweat, looking dirty and ugly. So I collected these bags and I started making these dolls. They are disposable labour, so they are made from waste materials.

As an artist, what would you say compels you to keep making work?

Shin Min: I want to create these visceral objects, rather than like pursuing high art. I want to share the message and relate to other fellow workers or other girls. Often, it’s on social media because they don’t have time to come to a museum, or they are working during the hours when art galleries are open. Maybe the only way they can communicate is through social media. It’s empowering whenever I relate to these people, and then they also share their story and they can relate to my work. That’s essentially what drives my practice. I want to share this connection with all the female workers. The dolls, they’re like talismans and they all have messages. It’s my way of protesting. I’m doing my best by creating these objects and artworks to raise a voice, to raise awareness and connect with people.

Shin Min’s Ew! There is hair in the food!! is presented at Art Basel Hong Kong 2025 by P21 gallery. Art Basel Hong Kong is running until 30 March 2025.