Jean Shin, Turning Trash Into Artistic Treasure : NPR

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103674782

Important lessons from artist Jean Shin, for my students and for everyone interested in learning to be more creative. See pictures and hear Susan Stamberg on Morning Edition, May 1, 2009.

• Look more carefully at what exists.
• It's not garbage, it has artistic meaning and can symbolize something important.
• Understand and celebrate the lives and work of ordinary people.
  
• Transform what exists, everyday objects, into something else.
  
• Concepts based on ideas that are meaningful to us- translate the viewing experience into a THINKING PROCESS.
  
• Find the meaning in (art) everything, by going beyond just looking, to feeling and thinking.
  
• The ideas come from underlying thinking, (what does it mean to get older), before starting the design of the art.
  

"In Jean's hands, the process of making these objects new again, of giving them life [and] restored purpose, and making us look at them — or asking us to look at them — in a completely new way is very artful," says Joanna Marsh, who organized the show for the museum.
At the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.