Kyungmi Shin, who received an M.F.A. in sculpture and installation from UC Berkeley and a B.S. in Biochemistry from San Jose State University, investigates the social and psychological implications of mass-media images and especially their relation to cultural stereo-types. After moving to Los Angeles in 1996, Shin found herself without a studio space separate from the one bedroom apartment she shared with her husband. She found that these space limitations pushed her work in a different direction — that of working with photographic images on a computer. She became increasingly conscious of the mass-media stimuli that sur-rounded her, and began to incorporate those images into her work. Her "Wallpaper Pattern" series from 1997–2000 utilized news photographs that Shin copied and multiplied, thus "disguising" the original photograph within the larger repetitive pattern. Currently, her methods are shifting from that of straight-forward appropriation to the creation of new visual icons through computer manipulations. Recently, she exhibited photographic works from "Blue Eyes," a series of photographs of friends and family in which the color of their eyes has been digitally altered to blue, in "Whiteness: A Wayward Construc-tion" at the Laguna Art Museum.