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Yeon Sung

science & technology, Ecology, D.I.Y, Digital technology, Decolonization, Audiovisual, Artistic research

Yeon Sung (연성) is an artist-researcher working – on, with, and through – Matter(s). Based between Rotterdam and Changwon, Korea, her practice critically engages with colonial legacies at the intersection of sociopolitics, environment, and technology, refracted through the lens of Matter(s). Treating Matter not as a backdrop but as an active witness and agent, she traces how material forms record, carry, and redistribute contemporary colonial conditions.

She adopts DIY strategies to build accessible sensing tools, experimenting with this performative practice as a form of decolonial enactment. Through the convergence of body and technology, she constructs counter-narratives that resist Eurocentric frames. By challenging dominant power structures through these hand-built devices, she sustains a democratic art form available to all, regardless of economic or social standing.

She currently runs the artistic research platform Archive of Matter(s) and leads Bring Your Own Bike (BYOB), a collective cycling performance series in which participants move as a sensing organism through the city, encountering polluted weather somatically and relationally across different urban environments.

Operation D: In Search of the Lost D
Operation D: In Search of the Lost D - Operation D: In Search of the Lost D is a participatory game-performance series that senses the material reality of dust-driven contamination in today's cities, launching its first edition in Seoul. It transforms the city into a stage where players, as time travelers from the future, embark on a mission to trace the vanished yet still present matter of fine dust. Unfolding in real time, it invites participants to return to 2025 for a limited quest in an era marked by pollution. Set against the backdrop of South Korea's forgotten fine dust crisis, shaped by shifting media attention, the project questions who holds central authority over measuring and visualizing dust. The performance consists of two stages: a DIY workshop, in which participants construct their own tracking tools and adopt specific roles, and a collective game-mission across the city, where they observe, investigate, and attempt to detect “D” under the artist's guidance. By merging speculative narrative, embodied performance, and DIY technology, the work destabilizes official pollution data and reveals how acts of sensing and detection themselves generate political as well as material realities.
Cycling the Unknown: BYOB (Bring Your Own Bike)
Cycling the Unknown: BYOB (Bring Your Own Bike)
Cycling the Unknown: BYOB (Bring Your Own Bike)
Cycling the Unknown: BYOB (Bring Your Own Bike) - Cycling the Unknown is a participatory performance series that explores polluted weather as a collective, embodied experience. Local residents and participants are invited to cycle through environmentally affected areas using their own bikes, engaging in a shared act of “weathering” guided by the artist. In this context, the bicycle becomes more than a mode of transport—it is reimagined as a speculative tool for sensing and experiencing environmental conditions. Developed in close collaboration with local communities, the project integrates lived experiences and grassroots knowledge, making participation a central part of the process. By treating the human body as a living sensor, the performance encourages reflection on one's relationship to air, pollution, and socio-political atmospheres. Cycling becomes a communal artistic practice—bridging movement, ecology, and activism.
(C)ynthesizer
(C)ynthesizer - (C)ynthesizer is a DIY-built synthesizer designed to respond to air pollution levels in real time. Mounted on a bicycle, it translates air quality data into sound, making pollution both audible and physically perceptible. Built with accessible components and open-source code, the instrument is intended as a shared tool—one that fosters public engagement with environmental issues through hands-on experimentation and open collaboration. A tool-making workshop was conducted with the community of Berlin Moabit, a neighborhood impacted by emissions from a nearby power plant. The workshop focused on co-developing DIY sensing tools, equipping local residents with the skills and resources to monitor and interpret their own environmental conditions.
Weathering Ports - Weathering Ports investigates the polluted weather of Maasvlakte, an industrial zone in the Port of Rotterdam, through artistic research and embodied practice. Drawing on the concept of weathering (Neimanis & Hamilton, 2018), the project explores how pollution interacts with the human body, bridging art, ecology, and environmental materiality. At the center of the work is a DIY apparatus mounted on a bicycle, used in a four-hour cycling performance across Maasvlakte. As the body moves through industrial air, it becomes a bio-archive—registering wind direction, toxic gas levels, body temperature, and heartbeat. These live metrics are sonified and broadcast through horn speakers, making otherwise invisible pollution perceptible in real time. By physically engaging with polluted weather, Weathering Ports reimagines the relationship between human and environment, positioning the artist as both sensor and performer within the industrial airscape.
D: DDD
D: DDD
D: DDD
D: DDD
Performance view: D:DDD (2022, SAPY) - D: DDD is an artistic activism project that reimagines fine dust sensing through three modes of practice: DOCUMENT–DIY–DEMONSTRATE. It merges self-built sensing tools with guerrilla performances at air monitoring stations across South Korea, directly confronting the country's ongoing fine dust crisis. The project challenges society's heavy reliance on the thousands of hourly data points produced by 614 state-run urban monitoring stations—numbers that often obscure more than they reveal. Inspired by environmental scientist Emma Garnett's research into the elemental ambiguities of fine dust, D: DDD shifts the focus from abstract measurement to embodied, political, and ethical engagement. It foregrounds the limitations of institutional monitoring and advocates for alternative, citizen-led modes of environmental sensing. Through performative disruptions and collective visibility, the project redefines the artist's role in an era shaped by pervasive particulate matter. We are no longer measuring; we are sensing.
ROOFTOP RADIO: WEATHERING STATION
ROOFTOP RADIO: WEATHERING STATION - “Rooftop Radio: Weathering Station” is a nomadic DIY radio booth broadcasting from various rooftops across South Korea. Inspired by the many weather stations mounted on buildings that generate streams of environmental data, this mobile radio transforms rooftops into performative stages. It captures the politics and aesthetics of these elevated spaces, weaving together narratives of resistance, survival, and autonomy that resonate through the airwaves. Alongside invited practitioners who explore their own forms of “weathering”—both artistic and political—the project aims to amplify diverse practices while collectively sensing the environmental and sociopolitical climate from above.
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: Specters of France's nuclear tests in the colonized Saharan desert in the 1960s. 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.
D-Beacon 1.0 - D-Beacon explores autonomous methods of sensing fine particulate matter (PM2.5), moving beyond conventional data collection to decentralize environmental monitoring and highlight the artistic potential of dust itself. In response to the lack of PM2.5 monitoring stations in Haarlem—one of the most air-polluted cities in the Netherlands—D-Beacon 1.0 was installed in the backyard of Nieuwe Vide. This self-built observatory challenges the dominant approach of reducing pollution to numerical data points. Instead, it transforms environmental sensing into a tangible, instinctive experience. By translating real-time PM2.5 levels, wind speed, temperature, and humidity into physical movements, the observatory activates D-Scene 1.0, an atmospheric scenography situated within the exhibition space. As Haarlem's first unofficial PM2.5 station, D-Beacon reclaims sensing technologies as tools for artistic expression and environmental awareness—inviting audiences to sense, not just measure, the air around them.
Installation view: D-Scape 2.0 (2021, Space Pado)
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 until 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 vitalized 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.
Installation view: Phantom Menace2.5 (2021, New Vide)

Cycle-Up

Date:
Location: ZK/U Berlin

Sonic Acts Biennale 2024

Date:
Location: Sonic Acts Biennale

V2_ Summer Residency

Date:
Location: V2_ Unstable Media

From the Sea to the Cloud to the Soil

Date:
Location: Stroom Den Haag
In association with: Stroom Den Haag
https://stroom.nl/activiteiten/tentoonstelling.php?t_id=3342338

Phantom Menace2.5

Date:
Location: Nieuwe Vide
In association with: Nieuwe Vide
https://nieuwevide.com/expositie/phantom-menace2-5/?lang=en

Matters, Acts

Date:
Location: Stroom Den Haag
In association with: Stroom Den Haag
https://www.stroom.nl/activiteiten/kleine_presentatie.php?kt_id=3617177
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