Jean Shin Hangs Anti-War Camouflage at Brooklyn Army Terminal

Jean Shin installed three sets of military-style camouflage nets inside the skybridge arches of the Brooklyn Army Terminal (BAT) in Sunset Park on September 19, completing "In Plain Sight," a yearlong public exhibition featuring 12 Brooklyn-based artists across two venues.

The new work, titled "Tidal Crossing," hangs camo banners between each net. Each banner bears images of flora native to a country where the United States has waged war. The installation marks the final addition to a show that has also filled the nearby Brooklyn Wholesale Meat Market for the past year.

What does the site bring to the work?

BAT once served as the largest military supply base in the US, a fact that gives the camo swatches an immediate, unsettling resonance against the terminal's industrial concrete. Shin works in three palettes drawn from actual military patterns that have appeared since World War II:

• "Frogskin," the mottled splotches used by US forces in the Pacific War
• "Chocolate Chip," the freckled configuration deployed in the Gulf War
• "Digital Camo," the QR-code-like design used in Afghanistan and Iraq between the 2000s and 2010s to confuse digital detection systems

The middle panel — featuring oysters, mussels, and seaweed — was photographed for Hyperallergic by Anna Lee. Each pattern evokes a different theater of US military engagement.

Who does the work address?

Sunset Park is home to large immigrant communities, and Shin's banners sit at the intersection of three kinds of migration: soldiers in covert missions, native plants transported to new countries, and the forced displacement of war-torn populations. The patterns read as both disguise and identity, asking viewers to recognize how foreign terrain becomes familiar.

"This project makes me think of the question, 'who belongs here?'" Shin told Hyperallergic during an on-site interview. "What's foreign at one point is actually really familiar."

The artist frames the inquiry as one about camouflage, exile, and ecological transplantation alike. She also suggests that the question of who belongs has no fixed answer — that every environment begins as foreign to those who arrive in it.

How does it close out the exhibition?

"In Plain Sight" has run for 12 months across BAT and the Brooklyn Wholesale Meat Market with contributions from 12 Brooklyn-based artists. "Tidal Crossing" arrives as the capstone piece, the last work to enter the show.

By selecting camouflage — the military's primary tool for hiding in plain sight — and rendering it transparent through overlaid floral imagery, Shin effectively turns the terminal's wartime function inside out. The camo no longer conceals; it announces, and what it announces is the ecological and human cost of the wars it was designed to support.

With the nets now fluttering in the onshore breeze above the skybridges, the artist has staged an anti-war camouflage directly on the very structure that once supplied the US military at scale.