Shinhye You is a ceramic artist born in South Korea in 1993 and currently based in London. Shinhye’s connection with clay began in 2013 at Kookmin University in South Korea, where she earned her BA and MA in ceramics. She has been based in London since completing her MA in Ceramics & Glass at the Royal College of Art in 2023.
Her works have been featured internationally, including at the Aveiro Ceramic Biennale, Ceramic Art Andenne, the International Ceramic Biennale in Siegburg, Ceramic Art London, and more.
Working across ceramics, writing, and installation, Shinhye develops written fiction rooted in magical realism, which she translates into visual forms through clay. Her ceramic works are tangible remnants of imagined worlds, suggesting traces of human lives and magical creatures that once existed. Appearing after the death of their fictional inhabitants, these works stand as empty vessels and fragments of a lost existence.
Through these pieces, Shinhye explores the afterlife of once-living beings, as well as the residue of fragile human presence and vanished beliefs. While her works originate from imagined narratives, they are also informed by personal experiences, memories, and emotions. Through these fictional worlds, she reflects on loss, longing, displacement, and fragility.
Her sculptures often carry a sense of melancholy and quiet beauty, offering traces of lives that can no longer be fully observed or recovered. Rather than presenting complete stories, they reveal fragments and remains through which viewers may connect with their own memories, griefs, and desires.
Visit Shinhye You’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2025-2026
These fairies are the souls of the dead, reborn as translucent winged creatures. Fragile and harmless, yet they contain unresolved sorrow and resentment that can curse the ones who dare to kill them.
I started making them during a residency in Jingdezhen, China, in the summer of 2025. Growing up in Korea, summer was always filled with the desperate singing of cicadas. After spending most of their lives underground, cicadas emerge only to scream their final love song before death. I have always found the nature of cicadas tragic. And when my fellow artist Reiko saw my work, she said it reminded her of the forest of cicadas she loved as a child—a place that has since been turned into a parking lot, burying countless cicada nymphs alive beneath the concrete.
And I think of all the beings that were killed without ever having the chance to resist. Under bombs, beneath gun barrels, and in the midst of deaths filled with grief and unresolved sorrow. I dedicate these fairies to all of them.
