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 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.