Hyun-Jin Yoo유현진
Water lets light through and keeps sound out.
I am a composer and sound artist. My work tries to make that asymmetry something an audience can hear, using hydrophones, submersible motors and multichannel sound.
Works
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viewThreshold of Light
Water lets light through and keeps sound out. This installation puts that asymmetry directly in front of the audience with video, sound, kinetic elements, sensors and lighting. At the opening, visitors responded mainly to changes in the sound and handled the microphone, and did not notice the asymmetry the work was built on. The asymmetry was present but not perceptible, and that observation is the starting point of my current research.
Concept, video and sound: Hyun-Jin Yoo. Kinetics, sensors and lighting: Eunkyung Yang. Top Prize, outdoor screening category, Gwangju Media Art Platform. Excellence Award, 2025 Digital Art Culture Lab: Project Lab (exhibition). In 2025 the video was also screened outdoors at Times Square in New York, Gwangju City Hall and Gwangju Songjeong Station.
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Light of Water
A fixed-media work built from hydrophone field recordings. It explores the sound world beneath the surface, which cannot be heard directly and reaches the listener only through conversion by microphone, signal and loudspeaker.
Performed at ICMC 2025 and NYCEMF 2026. Accepted to SEAMUS 2026.
Fixed media, stereo, 5:19 -
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Cloud
Inspired by Hermann Hesse's poem “The White Cloud.” Clouds are always in a new shape, and the piece tries to capture their many images. Part of a whale's song is quoted from George Crumb's Vox Balaenae. The video superimposes clouds of different shapes, filmed over seven days, from morning through noon to sunset. Set against the music, a single scene suggests that a changing event is determined by the person who interprets it.
Premiered at ELECTRONISM – KIEssic, 5 November 2023. Performed at NYCEMF 2024.
Score excerpt, opening -
viewNotak 노탁
The exhibition presents the ocean as a "home for non-humans." Notak (HYTAT), a word from a nomadic language, means "home." Visitors meet questions posed by non-human beings hiding in a virtual space, and are invited to look for points of coexistence and to reflect on human-centered thinking.
Planning and sound production: Hyun-Jin Yoo. ACT Festival 2023 Future Legends, ACC Professionals Content Execution Training Program (1st cohort), Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, 10–19 November 2023. Shown again at the National Science Museum, Daejeon, in 2024.
No works of this type yet.
Performances and exhibitions
- 2026SEAMUS 2026Accepted. Light of Water, fixed media.
- 2026NYCEMF 2026Light of Water, fixed media.
- 2025ICMC 2025Light of Water, fixed media.
- 2025Threshold of Light, videoOutdoor screenings at Times Square, New York; Gwangju City Hall; and Gwangju Songjeong Station. Presented by the Gwangju Media Art Platform (G.MAP) with Arts Council Korea and Gwangju Metropolitan City, alongside the exhibition. Top Prize, outdoor screening video category. With Eunkyung Yang.
- 2025Jangseung Baekyajeon 장승백야전Barrier-free theatre by Theater Nalgae. Composer. Seonghwan Culture Center, Cheonan, 13 June 2025 (two performances). Presented by the Cheonan Cultural Foundation.
- 2024Light of Dongnyeong 동녕의 빛: 석오 이동녕과 서전서숙New play by Theater Nalgae. Composer. Chungnam Student Education and Culture Center, Cheonan, 6 September 2024.
- 2024Lala Ensemble: Digital Resonance 라라앙상블의 디지털 공명Arranger. With sand art, media art and an ensemble of voice, strings, piano, pansori, daegeum, gayageum and drum. Sinyong Elementary School, Cheonan, 27 August 2024. Part of the 2024 Cheonan Culture City project.
- 2024NYCEMF 2024Cloud, for piano and fixed media.
- 2023ELECTRONISM – KIEssicOne of three composers, with 박수진 and 전우진. Works: Cloud (premiere); Essential Sound (2019), for geomungo and live electronics; Love Song (2023), for Korean pansori. Presented by Lala Ensemble. 모나무르 Gallery, Hall 1, 5 November 2023. Selected for the 2023 Chungnam Culture and Tourism Foundation professional new music program.
- 2021–22pack(un)pack, pack2 to pack4Participating artist and sound production, 10k Stones Project (만석프로젝트). A sound-log series in which artists make work from sounds they meet at the same time in different spaces. Online sessions on 4 November 2021, 3 December 2021 and 28 January 2022, released on the project website and YouTube.
- 20200 to 1Exhibition by the 10k Stones Project (만석프로젝트), a group started by seven composers. Audiovisual work. 18 September – 4 October 2020. Supported by the Seoul Metropolitan Government and the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture.
Research
Standing at the edge of a pool, you can see the bottom clearly and hear almost nothing of what happens beneath the surface. I want to make that physical asymmetry perceptible as an aesthetic experience.
At the opening of Threshold of Light, visitors responded to changes in the sound and handled the microphone, and did not notice the asymmetry the work was built on. The asymmetry was present but not perceptible. My current question is how to design for that perception when the medium, rather than the artist, sets the distance between what is seen and what is heard.
Bio
Hyun-Jin Yoo is a composer and sound artist. She studied composition at Hanyang University (BM) and completed an MM in electronic music composition at the same graduate school. Her work spans fixed media, live electronics, sound installation and interactive art, and she also works as a composer and arranger for a classical-based ensemble.
Her fixed-media work Light of Water was performed at ICMC 2025 and NYCEMF 2026 and accepted to SEAMUS 2026. Cloud, for piano and fixed media, premiered in 2023 and was performed at NYCEMF 2024. Earlier works were selected and performed at SICMF (2019) and the Daegu Contemporary Music Festival.
With support from Arts Council Korea and the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, she took part as a co-composer in the 10k Stones Project (2020, 2021). In 2023 she contributed planning and sound production to the virtual exhibition Notak at the ACT Festival. With Eunkyung Yang, as the duo Seomgwang, she made the installation Threshold of Light (2025), which won Top Prize in the outdoor screening category and an Excellence Award at the Gwangju Media Art Platform. Its video was screened outdoors at Times Square in New York, Gwangju City Hall and Gwangju Songjeong Station. She has taught composition at Gwangju Arts High School since 2024.
- 2024–present
- Lecturer in composition, Gwangju Arts High School
- 2023–2025
- Assistant instructor, Culture Education Department, Asia Culture Center. In 2025, also coordinator of the Future Sports Day program
- 2023
- Lecturer, Jeonnam Arts High School
- 2022
- Intern, Asia Culture Center
- 09/2018–02/2020
- Research assistant, Electronic Music Research Institute, Hanyang University
Contact
- hyunjinyoosound@gmail.com
- @blueholic_u__