Hye Young Sin, How to grow

Gemeinde Köln presents the first solo exhibition of the Korean artist Hye Young Sin entitled “how to grow”. For her solo exhibition debut, the artist is showing installations and sculptures that emerged as a result of a visit to her mother’s urban farms in Seoul.

“Suk Hee has been growing vegetables for over ten years, and I grew up with it. Last summer I visited her city farms in Seoul for the first time. She often said that Chinese cabbage grows as pretty as I do, and I didn’t know the significance until I was there. Looking at the carefully managed farms, I came to basic questions about what it means to grow and how to be grown.” (Hye Young Sin)
Sin’s artistic focus is on re-evaluating the concept of growing and researching different farming methods, with a particular interest in the cultural and technological factors that shape our relationship with the plant world. She often incorporates kinetic elements into her work, such as self-constructed motorised objects that move and change over time or in response to the actions of the audience. For the installation “Permanent planting”, electrostatic energy is used to investigate the relationship between soil and plant behaviour. Thin white papers move up and down according to static electricity controlled by a cyclic sounding system. This phenomenon is susceptible to its environment, especially moisture, much like plant creatures.

Another installation, “A seed room”, suggests imaginary conditions for the growth of a seed, such as music, light and darkness, and even the presence of another being. The project is inspired by Jan Van Helmont’s pioneering experiment in the 1600s, which showed that most of a plant’s weight comes from water. In the installation, an imaginative seed spins slowly next to a robot that crawls around it. Light and darkness in the space are controlled to mimic the natural day and night cycle, while music creates a calm yet stimulating atmosphere for the seed. This picturesque setting references the significant advances in plant growth technology over the centuries.

Hye Young Sin is a Seoul-born artist living in Cologne, Germany. She studied Consumer Science and Information and Cultural Technology at Seoul National University in South Korea. She then moved to Germany and studied “Media Arts” at the KHM since 2016, graduating in 2022. Her work has been actively presented in exhibitions and media/sound art festivals, including e.g. next generation 8.0 at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Sound/Image 19 in London, INSONORA in Madrid and 21st Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival in Seoul.

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