Freja Jiahui Ye

Freja Jiahui Ye is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, sound, performance and scenography.

Moving between fieldwork, dramaturgy, alchemical processes and material agency, her work investigates what happens when a structure or system is left inside forces it cannot control. In past works, she grew wearable sculptures through chemical crystallisation, dressing a performer in them until they were heavy enough to strain and sharp enough to cut, then let them dissolve in water. She created a fictional town shaped by dampness, animal presence and half-remembered ritual, and set iron filings into orbit around a magnetic field to make an invisible force briefly visible

Across her works, the human, mechanical and non-human remain in constant, low-grade entanglement, refusing clear boundaries of dry, solid material through use of leaky, porous residual matter. Absurdity meets poetry as material transformations converge. She works to break the one-way relationship between artwork and audience, shattering safe viewing distances, shaping her works to reach audiences through open, multi-sensory means.

She holds a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and was selected for a residency fellowship at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. Featured in Numéro Magazine and exhibited internationally across the UK, US, Germany and Asia.

Condensation: A Held Breath

2026, London

resin, fiberglass, ceramic, rusted metal, screws, antique metal bells, lace, stone

Between them sits a pause, not quite ascent, not quite collapse.

Suspended mid-air, the translucent resin vessel encases fine impurities. Light gathers first, thin and unsure, as if moisture hadn't yet decided to become mist or water. It reads as a lamp, or a relic, or something left hanging from a shrine long emptied of its use. Its surface mimics biological tissue — aged stratum corneum, air-dried mucous membrane, tissue that has kept the dust of time, lending a sense of somatic vulnerability. It looks weightless. It isn't — something is still holding it there, and holding costs.

Below, a precarious foot balances on rusted metal, pitted and uneven, standing the way a ruin stands: not because it's stable, but because it hasn't yet fallen. Weight, pressure, the threat of falling, not unlike the condition of any body still upright. Stability here is never neutral, only continuously negotiated between what is above and what is beneath.

It is a temporary arrangement, not a resolved one, like a breath that cannot be exhaled, nor swallowed.

Photo: Jialin Yan (@keykeyyan)

'02:47-unknow', present in Almost Home programme

2026, London, UK

Role: Curator/ Participating artist

This project explores states of displacement, blurred identity, and fragile forms of belonging within today’s increasingly standardized social systems. Co-curated with the Institution Chimimora, brought together nearly 30 different back ground artists presented sounds, visual art, short film, installation, and sculpture.The event took place in non-traditional, underground spaces. "02:47-unknow" was built a site-responsive work constructed on site, in direct relation to the specific spatial and temporal conditions of the venue.

At the edge of a sensory-overloaded rave, a makeshift shelter stands quietly assembled from steel poles and scavenged fabric, nearly swallowed by the crowd and its noise, like a fold overlooked by the mainline of time. It belongs neither to the order of the dance floor nor fully outside it, a place that slips out of the frenzy. Inside, a six-minute loop plays across the fabric, accompanied by an immersive soundscape, voice and non-voice, an intermittent bell, low frequencies bleeding into electronic noise, permeating the corner. At the entrance, a pair of feet is visible, soles worn through, laces undone. The rest of the body disappears behind the drape.  No one knows their name, their story, or whether they are still alive. The unnamed body interrupts the rhythm of the rave, leaving an unresolved sense of unease.

Almost Home with Chimimora CIC

Vespers London, JUL 2026

Role: Curator/ Participating artist

Almost Home is an ongoing curatorial strand, an exploration of belonging, movement and memory carried out through moving image, field recording, storytelling, temporary exhibition, installation and listening practice. What started as an open call for films has since grown into a travelling platform of screenings, sound archives, temporary exhibitions and site-responsive events. Rather than pinning home down to a fixed place, Almost Home treats it as something continually remade, through encounters, landscapes, and moments shared with others. This project explores states of displacement, blurred identity, and fragile forms of belonging within today's increasingly standardised social systems.

I co-curated it with the institution Chimimora, bringing together nearly 30 artists from different backgrounds, who presented sound, visual art, short film, installation and sculpture. The events took place in non-traditional, underground spaces. We've staged editions in cities including London and Bangkok.

Damp Town
2024, London, UK
Site-responsive project including seven characters and a sound piece within the space.

Damp Town is a site-responsive project that brings together sound, sculpture and spatial installation as an eerie fictional town seeping with memory and animal presence. Dampness works less by seduction than by dissolving edges — the line between outside and inside, between skin and air — until the body can no longer ignore its own surface. It slows the breath, blurs concentration, and settles the whole space into something like inertia: everything damp, everything waiting.

Beside the fountain, a line of words blurred by water vapour whispers an ancient ritual: "Offer a token, and your wish may come true." To wish here is not to ask for an answer, but to admit how little of one's own longing can ever be controlled. Each object offered sinks into the muddy water of the well and changes according to rules of its own; no one can ever know what it becomes, or what has been awakened beneath the surface.

A poignant horror unfolds as fragments of bodies, relics, and forgotten traces haunt the wet walls of the town. Footsteps, breathing, and heartbeats of the more-than-human accompany the space, while skeletal structures and hybrid human forms are suspended within a surreal soundscape between ruin and dream.

Level 0.5, A Space Gallery, Virtual Exhibition, New-york, US

107-10.08.2026

Amor Fati

2021, Shanghai

Performance with crystallised wearable sculptures; Photographic documentation

Amor Fati began as a fabric, and ended as a mineral. Over six months I let a chemical solution work its way across knitted pieces, shifting the temperature around it to coax the growth into crystal — sometimes slowly, sometimes fast enough to force strange, sudden lattices. I wasn't sculpting so much as provoking a material to do what it already wanted to do under pressure: grow, spread, harden. Then I caught the moment when it looked like something a person could wear. The garment is also a geological event.

It doesn't fit the way a wearable piece is supposed to fit. It's heavy. Its edges are sharp enough to open skin, and they do, every time it's worn. That was never something to hide from — the whole performance is built around what a body does once it can no longer move carelessly. Each gesture has to be found first, weighed, then committed to, because the wrong one draws blood. Walking becomes a decision. Turning becomes a decision. The room fills with that kind of attention, the tension of moving through a structure that will cut you if you forget yourself.

I think of the crystallization as an old, faintly superstitious hope smuggled into the present — that heat, time, and the right conditions can turn one substance into another, now spoken in the language of chemical reaction rather than alchemy. It is lab result and vestment at once, grown rather than made, which is maybe why it never quite behaves like something a person owns. The performance is about letting material, rather than intention, determine what the body could do.

By the end, the performer steps into a tank of glass and water and lets the crystal come apart. Everything that grew slowly over six months dissolves in minutes, back into the element that made it possible in the first place. Nothing is preserved. The body that was armored and cut is finally just wet.

Photo: Jia Ling Hoo (@jialinghuphoto)

Aether

Mechanical Installation, 2025, Hamburg, Germany

Behind the tilt 45 degrees surface, 9 magnet rotates endlessly.

It lifts the iron filings into temporary constellations

then lets them fall. Lifts them again. Lets them collapse again. 

Repeat and repeat, ever settle. Migration without destination.

The inverted bicycle light on the left continuously rotates, emitting intermittent red light.

It stages repetition. An invisible force dictates the choreography

45° suspended tilted transparent acrylic plane

Rotating umbrella frame

Rotating magnetic array composed of 9 permanent magnets

Iron filings

Rotating umbrella frame

Concrete plinth

Modified inverted bicycle lamp with intermittent rotating red light

Tension suspension structure, Motor

Invisible forces shaping visible phenomena/ Material migration under competing forces/ Agency within systems/ Order and randomness/Perception of hidden

structures/ Kinetic installation/Magnetic force and motion system/Dynamic material transformation/Visualization of invisible forces/Light and shadow

intervention/Perceptual field/Material migration/Continuous negotiation between forces

The Rope Forgot its Knot, Installation, London, 2023.

Who fired the bullet?

Oil and Acrylic on canvas,  2021, London

After Shedding

Oil and Acrylic on canvas, London, 2022

What the Goat Brings Back

Photographic, 2023.

This project began as fieldwork — wandering through a stretch of desert edged by a river, where sand gives way to narrow bands of green before returning to sand. Nearby, half-buried ruins, donkeys and goats shared the same worn paths as people. The camera recorded what often falls outside official histories: the daily overlap between human and animal lives, abandoned structures, traces left on the land, and oral memories tied to specific places — the small, uncatalogued fragments rarely preserved in historical records. As the shooting went on, goats kept turning up in the frame, uninvited, moving between wild and domesticated, real and mythic.

Wherever power writes its own version of events, something remains outside the frame — a village,  a women, a language, an animal, a personal testimony, and how a person rebuilds their connection to land, memory and local knowledge, through walking, looking, photographing, writing, myth.

What the Goat Brings Back

oil and acrylic on canvas, 2023

The photographic archive got pulled further, into a painting and a poetry:

A goat fishes a past life out of the soup pot / fishes out shreds of grass, a stomach lining / 

a gaze chopped up on the dinner table, severed testicles / the one thing it won't give up is that black hide

Turned into something closer to an imaginative narrative, one about the history that gets left out: labour, power, reincarnation, folklore, migration, identity, the echo historical events leave behind.

With Each Leap, The Rabbit Breaks a Bell’s Tail, 2024

ASA International Residency Fellowship, Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (HFBK), Hamburg, Germany

Kinetic and Multi-sensory installation(Sound/Visual/Scent-based Spatial Practice)

With Each Leap, The Rabbit Breaks a Bell’s Tail consists of five interconnected installations combining kinetic sound sculpture, found objects, and multi-sensory spatial elements. Through the de-functionalisation and reconstruction of everyday objects, the project explores how systems of measurement, value, and identity shape contemporary experience.The central work transforms a traditional weighing scale into a kinetic mechanism that repeatedly strikes a aluminium cast object beneath it. The movement produces sound while gradually wearing down both elements. The scale’s original function of measuring value is replaced by a repetitive cycle of impact and depletion. This action becomes the “leap” referenced in the title, reflecting on the relationship between evaluation, labour, and exhaustion.

Irreversible material processes/ Defunctionalisation and reconstruction of objects/ Measurement and value systems/ Repetition and exhaustion/ Invisible structures shaping human experience/ Tensions between control and vulnerability/ Embodied perception / Allegorical installation/ Material poetics/ Spatial narrative/ Poetic absurdity

'Devouring', 

Featured in Numéro Magazine China, No.105, ISSN2789-2972 Autumn, 2021

'Beans and Bones' , Collaborative Project and Exhibition developed with Art Ashram, Anna Mieves & Anna Lena Grau

PARKS, Hamburg, Germany, 2024