Today we’d like to introduce you to Rachel Shin.
Rachel, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I am a first-generation Korean American born in Virginia and raised in Maryland. I am also the first in my household to pursue a higher education. I was a kid who doodled a ton on printer paper, notebooks, and napkins but I had never envisioned myself going into the arts as a career. It was hard to see myself becoming an artist as I had always been told that other career choices that were not the arts was more respectable and sustainable. However, It had all changed when I had gotten my first sketchbook in middle school and started to draw everyday as a hobby. I had slowly noticed that I found passion and joy in creating pieces and I was yearning to become the best I could be.
From high school, I decided that the arts was no longer a hobby and that I wanted to pursue it as a career. There was never a week I was not drawing, painting, or creating and I had tried to find every avenue to further my art and was fortunate enough to attend two preparatory college programs on scholarships at MICA and RISD. My experience in these preparatory programs led me confident in attending an arts college in my future.
With the support of my mom and through scholarships and multiple jobs, I was able to attend the Rhode Island School of Design for two amazing years as an illustration major. At RISD, I found myself to be discovering what it meant to be an artist of this generation. I explored parts of myself that I never had the opportunity to with the access to facilities and mediums I never used before. My work had grown to become something that I was proud of.
My love for visual storytelling blossomed at RISD but I had always felt that there was something more in store for me. A big shift in my education occurred when I realized that my dreams laid in Animation. To learn more ways to tell my stories, I followed this dream and made the decision to restart my college education. In 2019, I enrolled at CalArts in Character animation.
Currently, I am going on to my second year in pursuing a BFA in Character Animation at CalArts.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
The road definitely has never been easy. My family originally had a lot of doubts in my decision to pursue the arts as a career. On top of that, it’s been known that a private art education is exorbitantly expensive with no promises of financial stability.
My mom came to the United States with the typical “American Dream”. In Korean culture, success is very important. Parents find a lot of pride in their children’s success. My mom’s American dream than became passed down to me. I became a symbol of my mother’s “success” and “American Dream”. So the pressures of success with the uncertainties of an art career is always on my mind.
A majority of my life, I grew up with a single parent. With this, I grew up with the knowledge that my education would be hard to finance. A higher education seemed out of the picture, but attending a private art institution seemed impossible. I have been very fortunate to have financed my education so far through scholarships and jobs. However, even with significant financial help, I know I still have a long road ahead financially.
I used to think I wasn’t contributing to the world as an artist while others around me were becoming doctors and computer scientists. But I now know that I am contributing just as much while making people laugh, smile, cry, and feel.
I’m proud of the artist I am today and am happy to have made the decisions I did regarding my education and career. I can now only continue to be ambitious and work hard on my art and I am hopeful everything else will fall into place.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I am actually working on something that is very important and personal to me. It is an animated short that tells the story of a mothers love and the sacrifices they make to insure our dreams can come true. It is bit of an ambitious project for me as this is an animation technique I am normally not familiar with. I am learning a lot of the story telling process and how to make an engaging film. I am excited to finish it in the next couple of months and am dedicating it to my mom and the many other mothers in this world who have helped pave the way for us.
Aside from my short film, I am spending my summer exercising my storytelling through illustrations, characters, and design. While doing freelance work and creating work for myself, I am paying extra attention to every day life and how I can bring that into my art.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
Growing up, I had only wished to have seen faces and characters that looked like me in American media. When I did have the opportunity to see someone who had looked like me, it often came with stereotypes, racism, and tropes.
Because of this, I now define success as my positive contribution to the world as an artist. Whether it is large or small, I hope to create inclusivity in my art for others to see themselves portrayed fairly in media.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://rachelshin.art
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drawsabi/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Drawsabi
Image Credit:
Rafael Lopez (Personal Photo), Rachel Shin (Artwork)
Suggest a story: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
