LOS ANGELES, CA.- Ehrlich Steinberg is presenting 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 present hypothetical scenarios relating to finance, legality, politics, or information exchange, with a shared prize pool determined by the pair’s joint decision to cooperate or defect. Across the three rooms, footage is continuously reconfigured using three distinct randomizers that shuffle the two players’ recordings.
In game theory, ‘delta’ measures how much players value future rewards relative to immediate ones, reflecting the likelihood that a game will continue. Central to the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the concept was modeled to simulate decision-making and payoff structures used during Cold War nuclear tensions, extending Shin’s engagement with systems shaped by militarization and governance. The thought experiment translates strategic uncertainty into discrete units of measurement, operationalizing patterns of future behavior and defining the limits of the game and its participants. By 1980, probabilistic computation identified “tit-for-tat”—a term for mirroring an opponent’s previous choice—as the most effective strategy for sustaining cooperation while minimizing risk. Under this model, a player infers another’s reasoning through repeated signals and doubling, treating each move as a mirror through which future behaviour is anticipated.
Installed in the upstairs corridor, three drawings depict images of signal processing, like noise and interference between channels. Each drawing comprises 160 circles and five colors corresponding to cooperation, defection, and varying logics for moves in the game. The marks accumulate as color fields or residue, reminiscent of grain and compression in time-based media.
Disrupting the temporal order within which predictive forecasting becomes possible, Delta reworks the game’s structural logic and projected linearity. The piece draws on Wittgenstein’s concept of language games, in which meaning is not fixed but generated through its own use, emerging from the rules and exchanges that structure interaction. In tandem, the work engages with the aesthetics of inscrutability: the historically produced attribution of opacity and illegibility to Asian or “Third World” subjects. As such, the work reconceives ‘delta’ from a finite measure to a space of contingency, open-ended duration, and permutative possibility. Delta produces conditions both constrained by and exceeding imposed frames of knowability, foregrounding the terms through which social and racial meaning is assigned and contested.
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. Shin has exhibited at the Los Angeles State Historic Park, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Queens Museum, Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Arts, Princeton University, Montclair State University Galleries, Doosan Gallery, Knockdown Center, and more. Their writing has appeared in Asia Art Archive, Mousse Magazine, and Post/doc, published by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. They have been invited as artist-in-residence at Princeton University, Indiana University, University at Buffalo, Banff Centre, and more. Their works have been reviewed in publications including Art in America, ArtPapers, ArtAsiaPacific, C Magazine and The New York Times.
