Jean Shin Creates Her Own Anti-War Camouflage

Military camouflage betrays its purpose in the latest installation at the Brooklyn Army Terminal (BAT) in Sunset Park. In Jean Shin’s Tidal Crossing, the artist presents three sets of military-style nets inside the arches of one of the terminal’s skybridges. Between each net, the artist has added camo banners overlaid with images of flora from the many places where the United States has waged wars.

Shin’s installation, which opened to the public on September 19, is the final addition to In Plain Sight, a yearlong public exhibition featuring the works of 12 Brooklyn-based artists at BAT and the nearby Brooklyn Wholesale Meat Market. It's a fitting addition to the complex, which once served as the largest military supply base in the US.

While its green, blue, and sandy camo swaths pose a striking contrast to the industrial concrete site, the military pattern also evokes themes that may resonate with the nearby immigrant communities of Sunset Park, probing the question of belonging in new environments, whether that be the disguise donned in the US military's covert missions, the transportation of native plants to new countries, or the forced displacement of war-torn communities.

"This project makes me think of the question, 'who belongs here?'" Shin told Hyperallergic during an on-site interview. "What's foreign at one point is actually really familiar."

Flanked by nets that flutter with the onshore breeze, each banner has a distinct environmental theme and a camo pattern that has appeared since World War II, from the mottled splotches of the design nicknamed "Frogskin," primarily used in the Pacific War, to the freckled configuration informally called "Chocolate Chip" used in the Gulf War. More recently, the US adopted a “Digital Camo” design, an almost QR-code-like military pattern used between the 2000s and 2010s to confuse the online detection systems in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

• Feature
• Jean Shin
• New York
• Public Art