Yeon Sung, 연성, is an artist-researcher based in South Korea and The Netherlands. Her artistic practice is centered on the critical examination of colonial dynamics at the intersection of sociopolitics, environment, and technology through the lens of non-human beings. Equipped with research-driven methods, weaving a non-Eurocentric narrative traversing space-time across multidisciplinary forms, using accessible technologies, she explores artistic practice as decolonial method.
She is currently working on the long-term project “The Matter Trilogy,” an experimental and multifaceted series that seeks to dissect non-human materials and the critical stories that they contain, from the colonial past into the ecological realities of today.
Weathering Ports - Weathering Ports investigates the pollution of Maasvlakte, an artificial industrial zone within the Port of Rotterdam. The project explores the polluted weather of Maasvlakte as an embodied phenomenon and offers ways to experience this with our bodies. The bike is equipped with sensors collecting data from the biker and its environment.
Weathering Station: Weathering Together
X-Scene 1.0, 2022, scenogrpahy, beach sand, arduino, radiation sensors, dust sensors, sub-woofers, electronics - Between 15 and 17 March in 2022 historical Saharan dust swirled across Europe. Scientists
recently found that dust particles also carried abnormal levels of radiation to Europe:
Spectres of France’s nuclear tests in the colonized Saharan desert in the 1960s.
<X-Scene 1.0> speculates a scenography of the dust-driven colonial toxicity entangled in
Dutch sand dunes. The dust vibration mediated by the real-time data on the soil surface in
The Hague is constantly fluctuating: it is a non-human expression of colonial toxicity that
seep through bodies and environments. The resonant explorations attempt to reveal the
unseen catastrophe beyond our vision; ringing and quivering the interconnectedness
between human and more-than-human which are of such urgency in the present moment.
The dust will never forget.
Performance view: D: D-D-D (2022, SAPY)
Rusty Odyssey, 2020, single-channel video, color, sound, 14min 25sec - Rusty Odyssey depicts the colonial faces of three copper coins (VOC Duit, Japanese Sen, and Euro coin) tracing their guilty chronicle from the 18th century till the present day in the Netherlands, Japan, and Korea. Transcending time and territories, the film cuts the temporal dimension of the geographies where the coins were born and follows the transformation of the monetary material as vitalized by capital. Rusty Odyssey reveals the colonial phantom behind the faces of the coins through the sites in which history is staged. The fluctuating heartbeat of copper—an inheritor of colonial capitalism—still lives on.
Installation view: Rusty Odyssey (2020, Cyart Gallery)
Rusty Odyssey, 2019, copper scrap, copper sulfate solution, arduino, mixed media, 60 x 30 x 150 cm - Nicknamed as “Dr. Copper,” copper has been a vital mineral for its diverse uses and for a significant barometer predicting the world economy; the global reserve of copper has thus represented the economic value. The installation demonstrates the monetary material, copper as vitalised by capital. The raw flesh of current Euro coins, so-called copper scrap is growing as crystals whose growth-rate is determined by the real-time market price of copper through the electrolysis process. At this very moment, the price of copper (about 2.7 dollars per pound) is changing, the heartbeat of the guilty material is fluctuating.
D-Beacon 1.0, 2021, PM2.5 sensor, anemometer, wind direction sensor, temperature/humidity sensor, mixed media, 100 x 100 x 300 cm
Installation view: D-Scape 2.0 (2021, Space Pado)
Installation view: Phantom Menace2.5 (2021, Nieuwe Vide)
