Gray Hive — a multimedia project encompassing performance video, installation, and photography — explores the intersection of two disparate systems. While humanity has long pursued eternal youth through technological progress, extending life expectancy to a century, the question of whether our happiness scales with our longevity remains unanswered. In our visions of the future, we often prioritize high-tech utopias, overlooking the more immediate, visceral reality of elderly isolation.

Shin constructs a speculative space by grafting the lived realities of the solitary elderly onto the biological ecology of honeybees. Just as bees secrete wax to build their hives, the elderly navigate a world reshaped by age-related decline. By merging domestic silhouettes with beehive structures, the work illustrates how routine, scientific repetition can evolve into a closed, impenetrable sanctuary. In the performance video, an elderly woman receives a daily ration of wax coins, melting them to wallpaper her surroundings and gradually thickening the boundaries of her world. This cycle reflects the paradox of “forced leisure”—where the very order and rules created to sustain life eventually become shackles. This black comedy leaves the viewer in an unsettling space between empathy and absurdity. The resulting hive evokes a futuristic shantytown, built from industrial materials yet hauntingly ahead of its time. This aesthetic collision serves as a distancing device, framing the performance as both fictional and ludicrous. Accompanied by minimalist music, the repetitive motions foster a sense of regularity that simultaneously invites empathy and maintains a calculated distance.