There’s a scene that doesn’t exist — not in the script, not on set, not even in the final render. A texture adjusted just enough to change the tone. A transition that holds tension you can’t quite name. A world pulled together behind the curtain, where visual decisions are made quietly but leave a lasting mark. You didn’t notice it, and yet you felt it. That’s San Yvin’s work behind the frame.
It’s easy to talk about the work — about the campaigns, the brands, the names. There are the heavy hitters: Fendi, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana. There’s the hardware: AICP shortlist nods for Mugler and Zara campaigns. But if you want to understand what Yvin actually does, you have to look at what he removes. What he lets remain a little off.
In the Mugler Alien Hypersense campaign, it was a refusal to follow perfume ad logic. The piece played like a dream on speed — bold, synthetic, almost violently sleek. But it wasn’t about the gloss. It was about the rhythm, the friction between femininity and force, and how to render that tension without flattening it. Yvin led the post-production chaos, threading global teams through a maze of VFX, editorial pacing, and constant iteration. There was no final until it stopped asking more of them.
In Zara Man’s Convergence, he helped rewrite the visual codes of fast fashion. The campaign leaned hard into mood — dystopian sets, choreographed movement, a desaturated palette that could have belonged to a sci-fi short. It didn’t look like Zara. That was the point. Behind the scenes, Yvin shaped the campaign’s emotional spine: editing not just for story, but for atmosphere, making sure the final cuts didn’t just sell clothes — they suggested something else.
He calls himself a “creative Swiss Army knife,” which sounds modest until you realize he’s not interested in labels at all. Producer, creative lead, producer, and post-producer— none of it quite fits. His real medium is control: the ability to push a frame until it starts breathing differently. To know what to kill and what to leave awkwardly alive.
With the experimental studio NewKino, Yvin’s instincts have extended into digital spaces — specifically the places where narrative, design, and data collapse into one. During a collaboration with Under Armour, he helped produce a limited-edition NFT drop based on Stephen Curry’s Genesis sneaker. But this wasn’t just brand merch. It was a storytelling artifact — wearables in the metaverse, backed by a real cause and a cultural symbol. Yvin didn’t treat it as a novelty. He treated it as continuity. A next logical step in a longer visual conversation.
You could argue his approach started back at D-Factory, a high-end retouching and digital production studio where he first learned to navigate the big names: Jean Paul Gaultier, Loewe, Hermès, Fendi. It was trial by fire. Post-production may not always be visible, but it’s where precision matters most — where final images either hold together or fall apart. That experience gave Yvin not only technical fluency, but a lasting edge: the ability to uphold creative standards under pressure, and to carry a visual narrative all the way to delivery.
At Space Cowboys Studio — a woman-led production house blending fashion and experimental film — he had the space to shift tone entirely. On the music-driven short Genesis, he art directed a piece that was about body and metamorphosis. The editing explorative. Bodies morphed in black liquid. It was, in many ways, a study in seeing — not what’s there, but what’s about to become.
Yvin is French-Vietnamese, born into visual tension. That duality, whether he names it or not, seems to run underneath everything he touches. His work doesn’t celebrate fusion — it moves through fracture. He’s not looking for balance. He’s looking for something that resists closure.
In fashion, in tech, in visual storytelling, we’re surrounded by resolution. Everything wants to be digestible. But Yvin’s projects carry a kind of productive discomfort — not glitchy, not broken, just not finished. The image keeps working after the campaign ends. There’s always more under the surface. Or beside it.
Maybe that’s what makes his work quietly radical. He doesn’t just direct — he disturbs, ever so slightly, the expectation of what a visual should do. And then, just as you’re about to lock it down, it drifts. Edits shift. Contexts dissolve. The image continues, but it’s not yours anymore.
Yvin doesn’t need to dominate the frame — he defines where it ends. His work lives in the edges: the tension between polish and pause, between clarity and distortion. It’s there, in the decisions most people don’t see, that his language becomes visible. And once you start recognizing it, you start noticing how often it’s there.
