Cemeteries serve as places where rituals and reflection come together, blending celebrations of life with meditations on mortality. At Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, artist Jean Shin’s new installations explore how these rituals and reflections influence our perception of time, affecting what we retain and what we let go.
Located in a meadow near the cemetery’s Gothic Revival gates, “Offering” (2026) was unveiled on April 18. This site-specific regenerative earthwork honors trees that spent their entire lives at Green-Wood. Inspired by tumuli, these artificial burial mounds are found globally, with Shin particularly drawn to the rounded, hill-like forms of traditional Korean funerary mounds, which she described to Hyperallergic as “distinctively different than when you walk around in an American cemetery.”
Harry Weil, Green-Wood’s vice president of education and public programs, recruited Shin for the meadow installation due to her use of found materials. “I really wanted to think about ways where we could challenge ourselves as an institution to create something large-scale — for us, at least — while also using and being inspired by the raw materials of the cemetery,” he told Hyperallergic.
Upon her initial visit after being commissioned, Shin noticed “elder trees” — a red oak and a pin oak — that needed removal due to damage and safety concerns for visitors. This motivated her to “honor them and give them a proper burial,” she said. This sentiment was echoed in her previous work, “Fallen” (2021), at the Olana State Historic Site, where she laid a fallen hemlock tree in a leather shroud.
“I just wanted everything to have ceremony,” Shin said, explaining that her work aims to celebrate the trees “as part of our lineage, as opposed to treating them like something that is no longer useful.”
With “Offering,” Shin sought to incorporate the ritualistic nature of burial into a permaculture method. She collaborated with the cemetery’s gravediggers to create a long trench for the tree, which spanned over a hundred feet, emphasizing “the magnitude of their volumes and their bodies,” according to Shin. Materials like fallen leaves and branches were also used to bury alongside the tree trunks. Near the end of last year, Shin and Dannielle Tegeder of Hilma’s Ghost organized a ritual around the ongoing installation, which was then covered in snow.
During a press preview on April 16, the trees were buried under a long, sloping, oval-shaped mound of soil by an excavator. At the event, which included a community ritual led by Korean shaman Mudang Jenn, volunteers planted wildflowers and shrubs atop the mound in shades of pink and green. As the trees decompose, they will enrich the soil, support microbes, and foster two interconnected ecosystems that benefit the plants above, transforming the installation into a living memorial.
“It’s like trying to imagine that death is not the ending, but really just the beginning,” Shin remarked.
This spring at Green-Wood, the theme of rebirth is prominent, with “Offering” coinciding with the reopening of the historic Weir Greenhouse, a Victorian-era landmark at Fifth Avenue and 25th Street. Lisa Alpert, Green-Wood’s senior vice president of development and programming, explained that the cemetery did not originally have a greenhouse. “So it was part of what I like to call the ecosystem around any large cemetery, which is funeral homes, monument makers, flower shops,” she said.
Built in 1880 and modified in 1895, the Weir Greenhouse is among the oldest surviving commercial greenhouses in New York City. Designated a city landmark in 1982, it fell into disrepair by the early 2010s. In 2012, Green-Wood purchased it from McGovern Florists, who had owned it for more than four decades. The cemetery then began a $43 million restoration, initially led by Page Ayres Cowley Architecture and Walter B. Melvin Architects, and later by Architecture Research Office (ARO) and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.
The project eventually included a new L-shaped building behind the greenhouse, covered in glazed terracotta fins.
“We recognized that there was a big gulf between what we as an institution knew and would impart through our programming, and what the public knew about us,” Alpert told Hyperallergic. Green-Wood collaborated with ARO to create a visitor center. The design was approved by the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2021 after previous proposals were rejected. The new building consolidates functions that were previously dispersed across the cemetery, including gallery spaces, archives, and offices for staff.
The structure also features a permanent exhibition space that narrates Green-Wood’s history, alongside a white cube gallery for art installations.
This gallery currently showcases Shin’s “Celadon Landscape” (2015–2019), previously exhibited at the Crow Museum of Asian Art in Dallas and the Sarasota Art Museum. The installation consists of two monumental mosaic vases, assembled from discarded pale blue-green ceramic shards, resting in a pool of ceramic fragments on the gallery floor.
Shin found these shards during visits to Korea and interactions with ceramic artists. “I got very excited and inspired by this mound of what I thought were still treasures, [even though] they rejected them because they weren’t perfect,” she said. These shards were included in a nearly two-ton shipment from Icheon, South Korea, for a previous installation at the Long Island Rail Road station in Flushing, Queens.
Separated from their origins, Shin views these shards as a metaphor for the Korean diaspora.
“The diaspora community, like myself, have somehow been broken away from our birthplace and yet in all the displacement and the distance, we’re still Korean, even though our context, language, and customs have shifted,” Shin stated.
Similar to “Offering,” this work incorporates ritual and participation, transforming over time as it remains on display until January next year. Visitors can write the names of loved ones on mulberry paper and respond to the prompt: “Who do we carry with us?” Shin plans to collage these fragments on a large scroll for installation in the gallery.
The piece aims to evoke a sense of belonging, which Shin believes is crucial for enduring life’s fragmented realities, symbolized by the broken ceramic shards in “Celadon Landscape.” She noted, “Today, as we experience such brutal realities — war, death, everything else — that sense of remembrance and what we hold onto is really critical.”
