Jinsook Shinde was born in 1952 in South Korea. She completed her B.F.A. from Hong IK College of Art in Seoul, South Korea in 1976. Later, from 1980-1983, she studied printmaking at Atelier 17 under Prof. S. W. Hayter in Paris. In 2000, she worked at Glasgow Print Studio in the UK.

Jinsook imbibes the techniques of traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy with contemporary art-making. Nature and landscape play a pivotal role in Jinsook’s work where the elements of nature act and react on the viewer’s mind like brief Zen notations. The Taoist images of simplification of forms in space are reflected in the formal economy of her work. She employs the deceptively simple line as her tool of expression.

Elements of colour that come from her adopted home India and the landscape of the Sahyadri Hills, all gather in her paintings as stratified layers of clay or stone, with a certain fluidity, much like the wind. Jinsook embodies her aesthetic with strips of paper arranged into prisms that refract metaphorical landscapes, marbled paintings and Chinese calligraphy.  By cutting the painted sheet into strips, she shares the dilemma of the contemporary artist who cannot view the landscape as a harmonious whole. Even as she replicates the unreliable temperament of nature in her work, she feels the need to reformulate the landscape in terms of a new order. She uses spontaneous brushwork, natural pigments and linear strips which are then positioned in such a way as to give the viewer the experience of the changing depth, space and surface texture, when the viewer moves from one viewing point to another.

Jinsook’s works are not simply abstract variations on a landscape. In her latter work, she begins to experiment with sculptures composed from paper, light, colour, and shadow. She has moved beyond the boundaries of conventional abstraction, extending its plastic and expressive possibilities. Her paintings, though static, are yet sculptural and animated like kinetic objects, and she induces speed with colour, a technique unique to her practice in contemporary Indian art.

Jinsook won many awards including the Bombay Art Society Award, Mumbai in 1984 and the D. G. Nadkarni Art Critic Award in 1986. In 2000, she was selected to participate in the 10th Triennale in India.