Ehrlich Steinberg is pleased to present Delta, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist TJ Shin, comprising a multi-channel video installation, drawings, and a newly commissioned text by writer and professor Sunny Xiang.

Taking place across the gallery’s upper rooms, the installation stages a modified version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, a concept in game theory developed by the RAND Corporation in 1950, in which two participants repeatedly choose between cooperation and defection for collective or individual gain. For this, Shin recruited sixteen participants identifying as Asian American Pacific Islander through a Craigslist advertisement, pairing them to play one of eight games from a deck of twenty prompts devised by the artist. The prompts relate to finance, legality, politics, and information exchange, with a shared prize pool at stake. Each monitor displays a single participant; across the three rooms, footage is continuously reconfigured using three distinct randomizers, decoupling participants from the game contexts in which they were originally recorded. Delta reconceives the finite measurements of the game-theoretical model as a space of contingency, foregrounding the terms through which social and racial meaning become assigned and contested.

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TJ Shin (b. 1993; Seoul, KR) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Shin received their BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2015 and their MFA in New Genres from UCLA in 2024. They have exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Queens Museum, Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Arts, Princeton University, Montclair State University Galleries, Doosan Gallery, Knockdown Center, and more. Shin's writing has been published in Artforum, Active Cultures, the Brooklyn Rail, Mousse Magazine, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. They have been invited as artist-in-residence at Princeton University, Indiana University, University at Buffalo, Recess, Wave Hill, Folly Tree Arboretum, Banff Centre, and more. Their works have been reviewed in publications including Artforum, Art in America, ArtPapers, ArtAsiaPacific, C Magazine and The New York Times.