Could you briefly introduce yourself?
Hi, I’m Hye Young Sin, an artist based in Berlin working with installation, sculpture, sound, and performance.

You studied Consumer Science and Information Science and Culture at Seoul National University. How has this academic background influenced your current artistic practice and methodology? In what ways do the perspectives or approaches you developed during your studies continue to inform your work today?
With a background in Consumer Science, I tend to observe and tract the circulation of products in the contemporary market. This has led me to develop a strong interest in objects. For me, objects carry traces of their time—its values, ways of living, technological conditions, cultural preferences, and structures of desire. I approach them as condensed material outcomes shaped by these forces.

In particular, I’m interested in the form and structure of objects designed around function. Objects whose use is not immediately legible often become the starting point for my formal experiments. For example, agricultural tools may appear structurally simple, but without any farming experience, I can only imagine how they are used, which I find especially compelling. Since encountering such tools in a hardware store in 2019, I’ve been developing a series of sculptures based on them.

You later moved to Germany to study media art. What led you to choose Germany, and what made you decide on media art over other artistic fields?
I chose Germany for many practical reasons. I hadn’t studied art in Korea, and after graduating I was working in a different field, so I began preparing to study abroad without telling my parents in advance. More importantly, tuition needed to be affordable in order for me to actually go overseas, so financial considerations were the most deciding factor. I later learned that many universities in Europe offered relatively low tuition, which made studying abroad possible. From there, I started looking into public art universities in Germany that I had already been interested in.

At the time, rather than focusing on a specific discipline right away, I wanted to explore a variety of media and approaches. I was interested in the intersections of different elements such as materiality and technology, and systems and environments, and felt drawn to a field that offered that kind of openness and flexibility. During my studies at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, I had the opportunity to work across sound, performance, media theory, and experiments with mechanical structures. Those experiences became an important foundation for the way I approach my practice today.

You have presented a wide range of works throughout your career. Could you select three pieces that you feel best represent your artistic practice and perspective? Please tell us about the background of each work, the questions or concerns that informed it, and the key ideas you hoped to convey to audiences.
Rather than focusing on my most representative works, I would like to talk about some of my recent projects

The first is “Plastic Garden - Trellis,” a sound installation combined with performance. The Plastic Garden series began with the idea of a plastic plant that grows through sound rather than water or sunlight. Since then, the project has continued to explore the question: “What makes a garden a garden?” For this work, I focused on the trellis, a supporting structure that has been used since ancient Roman times. By attaching instrument strings and a small motor to the trellis, I transformed it into a stringed instrument and approached the sounds it produces as a form of cultivation.

My interest in plants and gardens began to take shape during the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when it was difficult to meet people in person, caring for houseplants became an important part of my daily life. The experience of tending dozens of plants in a small space eventually led to the creation of Early Growth. After seeing this work, my mother suggested that I visit a community garden. I knew that she had been growing vegetables for more than a decade, but until then I had never paid much attention to it. However, my first visit left a lasting impression on me, one that remains vivid to this day. Since then, I’ve continued to reflect on what it means for humans to cultivate and care for other forms of life. That question has stayed with me and continues to inspire my work. As I continued developing works that generate movement and sound, explaining their operation and maintenance to exhibition staff became part of the artistic process.

I began to see a parallel between caring for and preserving these works and tending plants in a garden. By bringing these two situations together within a single structure, I wanted to make the often invisible labor of maintenance visible as part of the viewing experience. Rather than positioning audiences as passive viewers, I invited them to become temporary participants in the care of the garden. To encourage direct engagement and the formation of relationships, I placed a maintenance manual and contact information in the exhibition space, allowing visitors to intervene in and contribute to the work. The second project is a performance titled “trashes”. After graduating from college, I moved to a new studio. While helping with the move, someone looked at the materials I had collected and asked, “Why are you paying to move all this trash?” I laughed at the question, but the sincerity behind it immediately made me realize how differently people assign value to objects. What seemed meaningful and worth preserving to me appeared completely worthless to someone else. That moment made me acutely aware of how subjective our systems of value can be. It also led me to a new question: rather than working with things that merely resemble trash, what would happen if I worked with actual trash itself?

Since then, I’ve spent years collecting and sorting waste generated through everyday life. In the process, I became interested in how individual patterns of consumption and ways of living are materially recorded in what we throw away. I found it fascinating that what people eat and drink, the environments in which they live and work, and even their movements through the world all leave traces in their waste. As I mentioned earlier, I understand objects as material outcomes in which multiple contexts are condensed. From this perspective, I see waste not only as a trace of individual experiences and perceptions, but also as a material index of social environments, consumer culture, and economic conditions.

This line of inquiry naturally led me to develop performances that engage waste through direct physical interaction. I typically clean objects collected from my kitchen or studio, then connect them to small motors and simple mechanical devices to generate movement and sound. The reactions produced by different materials, weights, and degrees of friction are difficult to control or predict. As a result, each performance unfolds in response to these material tensions and processes of transformation. In this context, waste is not treated as a passive object but emerges as an active agent, shaping situations through vibration and resistance. By closely attending to these sounds and movements, I continually adjust and guide the flow of the performance. The third project is a performance series titled “Housewarming”. It began with a desire to extend the premise of a plastic plant that grows through sound from the context of a garden into that of a greenhouse. I was particularly interested in the origin of the word “housewarming,” which refers to the historical practice of warming a new home with fire. Drawing on this idea, I imagined a fictional scenario in which a greenhouse is first heated through sound, and developed it into a sound performance. While researching greenhouse systems, I became interested in the airflow generated by ventilation fans. This led me to explore ways of connecting those mechanisms to musical instruments and sound production.

While developing sound environments by combining ventilation fans and instruments, I also became interested in the greenhouse as a structure itself. As I studied the historical development of greenhouses, I began to focus on how humans have sought to control climate and regulate conditions for sustaining life. I found it fascinating that the same type of structure is referred to by different names and constructed from different materials depending on the time period and cultural context. For example, “greenhouse” is the common term in Europe, whereas in Korea, “vinyl house” is more widely used. I’m interested in how these linguistic and material differences shape the way we perceive and relate to the environment.

As part of the performance, airflow generated by ventilation fans activates wind instruments such as harmonicas and recorders, producing soundscapes in which the density and temperature of the space seem to shift. Rather than producing specific notes or rhythms, the work operates more as a process of intervening in the interaction between layers, air, and structure. In earlier stages, I was more interested in automated sound systems based on timers, but over time my practice expanded to include the direct physical responses of plastic membranes. Through this series, I’ve been exploring how humans, objects, and machines can collectively construct imagined climatic conditions. Through your performances and installations, you place strong emphasis on the idea of the “site.” What does the notion of the site mean to you in your practice, and how do you design the relationship between the work and its audience?
Through sound installations and performances, I’ve come to understand the site not simply as a place where works are presented, but as a structure in which sound, space, and human movement operate together to produce lived, embodied experiences. Because sound is not a fixed medium, it continually shifts depending on the location and the movements of the audience. As a result, even the same work can generate entirely different sensory conditions depending on where it is installed or performed, and on how audiences move through and inhabit the space. This has led me to focus on how sound disperses and reflects within space, how external sounds mix with internal audio environments, and how patterns of audience movement and presence shape the relationships that emerge within the work.

What are your thoughts on the rapid expansion of AI art in recent years? How do you view this current trend, and in what ways has AI influenced your own artistic practice?
Last year, in an attempt to explore AI not merely as a creative tool but as a collaborator, I used ChatGPT’s voice and camera functions to read text-based musical scores and experiment with a vocal duet. We practiced every day and eventually performed it live on stage. At first, I thought of the process as a way of training the AI, but over time it became closer to an experience of forming a working relationship with it, similar to that of a human collaborator. What struck me in particular was that AI can function as a communicative agent without desire or emotion. Even when we made the same mistakes repeatedly, it didn’t become frustrated or discouraged, which allowed us to continue practicing without interruption. The one who felt frustration was me, the human collaborator.

In AI-based art practices, I’m interested not only in using technology as a creative tool, but also in critically examining the conditions and structures through which it operates. Artist Areumbit Park’s video work “Tell You Something Bad” draws directly on actual AI training interfaces and processes. I found it striking how the work reveals the paradoxical structure in which human labor is repeatedly exposed to unethical and violent imagery in order to produce a “better” model.

You are currently based in Berlin. What role does the city play in shpaing your artistic practice and identity? How has your experience of living and working in Germany influenced your creative process?
I’m directly influenced by Berlin’s vibrant community garden culture. These gardens—both large and small—are woven into the everyday urban landscape, and visitors can easily take part through regular events and workshops. These days, especially in spring, the gardens require a lot of maintenance. I went last week and will go again this week to help remove weeds and replant. When I clear away the dried mulch and see the rich soil beneath, I feel a sense of relief and am reminded of the vitality of spring in a very physical way.

I learn a great deal from the plants in the garden, but also from the people who care for them. The participants are different each time, so we often don’t know each other’s names, but we still come together to admire the garden and talk about the coming spring. I think I’m drawn to this kind of loosely formed community. The warmth that exists within its slow pace quietly and subtly influences both me and my work.

You have participated in many international festivals and exhibitions. Could you share a memorable moment when audiences from different cities or cultural contexts responded to your work in unexpected or different ways?
When I performed Plastic Garden-Trellis last year as the opening of my solo exhibition in Berlin, some audience members came up to me and said, “The sounds of bells and whistles reminded me of the film Exhuma,” and “I felt a sense of shamanic atmosphere.” I hadn’t anticipated these kinds of interpretations, so it was both surprising and fascinating to hear.

In another instance, after seeing the glossy materials I used in Spring Arches, a sound installation from my solo exhibition two years ago, a friend jokingly asked, “Since when did your work become so twisted?” On the other hand an audience member described the work as meditative. Hearing this, my friend responded, “Maybe I’ve been living in Berlin for too long,” and we all ended up laughing together.

I’m also curious about how you learned German. How did you study the language, and how do you deal with linguistic and cultural differences in your work and everyday life?
I focused intensively on learning German while preparing to study abroad at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Once I started school, I mostly communicated with my classmates in English, so I had relatively few opportunities to use German. These days, I organize the expressions I need in advance and review them when preparing for interviews or leading children’s workshops.

In the early days of studying abroad, I found myself emotionally affected by the challenges of linguistic and cultural differences. I often felt frustrated when communications wasn’t smooth or when I couldn’t fully understand what was going on.

However, once I accepted that these differenes can’t be fully overcome, I began to approach them differently and form new kinds of relationships with them. This shift made me feel much more at ease.

What is your daily life like as an artist? And what do you do outside of your studio practice to find inspiration?
I have either a performance or an exhibition in a different city every month, so I travel frequently. When I don’t have anything scheduled, I tend to follow a fairly consistent daily routine. I usually go to bed around 11 p.m. and wake up at 6 a.m. I take a walk in a nearby park in the morning, then return home and start working right away. Outside of work, I enjoy visiting exhibitions and performances, as well as doing yoga and swimming.

One place I recommend in Berlin is LOOM. The space operates on a one-visitor-per-hour system, so advance reservations are required. This allows each viewer to experience the exhibition and the space in a very direct and concentrated way, creating a more intimate relationship with the works. LOOM is run by artist Youngna Kim, and I visit regularly not only for the exhibitions themselves but also for her approach to curating, which I find inspiring.

Lastly, could you tell us about the project you are currently working on or any upcoming plans? What directions or approaches are you interested in exploring in your future practice?
I’ve been revisiting the objects used in Trashes, exploring them again through a sculptural approach. The project began as a sound performance, but as I continued presenting it over time, I gradually discovered the formal potential of these objects. Performance and sculpture are very different media, so I’ve been enjoying the process of moving between them through a lot of trial and error.

Interview & Concept: Sohee Shin
Editing: Leslie Klatte
German Translation: Leslie Klatte
English Translation: STAR KOREA AG