Yeahwon Shin (신예원) is a South Korean jazz vocalist who sings Brazilian songs in Portuguese and Korean children's songs, and who began as a pop singer in Korea before moving to New York to study jazz. Her releases bill her in two forms. Her 2010 ArtistShare debut and its Latin Grammy listing say simply Yeahwon, while her ECM album and Discogs say Yeahwon Shin; the Korea JoongAng Daily reported that her 2002 pop album Lovely came out under her full name, Shin Yeahwon. No birth date has been published. The JoongAng Daily called her 30 in both April and September 2011, which points to a birth year around 1980 or 1981, and Qobuz's biography says she is from Seoul.

The JoongAng Daily reported in 2011 that she released Lovely in 2002, praised for a clear, emotional voice, and that she sang on recordings by Korean pop artists including Kim Jin-pyo, Yoon Sang, Lee Seung-hwan and Leessang. Qobuz says she studied at Dongduk Music University in Seoul. In the same JoongAng interview she said she had wanted to be a pianist as a child and had also studied violin, guitar, drums, the haegeum and the janggu. She left for New York to study at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, in 2004 according to the JoongAng Daily and 2005 according to Qobuz, and graduated with honors in 2006; a Kyunghyang magazine piece from February 2011 said she finished first in her class.

Her turn to Brazilian music came through her husband, the guitarist and producer Chung Sun (Sun Chung), whom she married in 2008 and who is the son of the conductor Chung Myung-whun. She told the JoongAng Daily that he thought she would suit Brazilian music, steered her toward it and found her a Portuguese teacher. Qobuz adds that she performed with the Brazilian composer and instrumentalist Egberto Gismonti, whom she names as her greatest influence.

Yeahwon (ArtistShare, 2010) is her first jazz album, produced by Chung. Of its eleven tracks, ten are Brazilian songs by Antonio Carlos Jobim, Milton Nascimento and Fernando Brant, Ary Barroso, Dorival Caymmi and Gismonti, and the eleventh is "Sae Ya Sae Ya" ("Birds, Birds"), a traditional Korean folk song. She sings in Portuguese throughout the Brazilian material. Discogs lists Kevin Hays and Alon Yavnai on piano, Ben Street on bass, Jeff Ballard on drums, Scott Kettner on percussion, Valtinho Anastacio on voice and percussion and Chung on guitar, with Gismonti guesting on piano on "Memoria e Fado" and the saxophonist Mark Turner on "Sae Ya Sae Ya"; the JoongAng Daily also names the percussionist Cyro Baptista. The paper described the album as a sign of a new generation of Korean jazz vocalists reaching the international market, and noted that Brazilian jazz was rarely sung by Korean singers. Asked about a Korean critic's remark that the record was not for the general public, she answered that she thinks only about the music and that listeners need not like everything.

On September 15, 2011 the JoongAng Daily reported that Yeahwon had been nominated for Best Musica Popular Brasileira Album at the 12th Latin Grammy Awards, making her the first Korean musician nominated for a Latin Grammy. The other nominees were Milton Nascimento, Mônica Salmaso, and Caetano Veloso with Maria Gadú; Djavan won with Ária. Earlier that year, on March 18, 2011, she had played the Philadelphia Museum of Art with Baptista, Hays and the bassist Doug Weiss.

Qobuz says she relocated to Munich in 2012 and signed to ECM Records. Lua ya (ECM 2337) was recorded in May 2012 at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, with the pianist Aaron Parks and the accordionist Rob Curto, and ECM released it on August 23, 2013. London Jazz News reported that it began when she visited a session there for Parks's solo album Arborescence; she and Parks improvised with voice and piano in the reverberant hall, and returned later with Curto, who shared her love of Brazilian music and had worked with her before. ECM's notes say the two had played together only once before the session and that the songs are mostly ones she learned from her mother. The thirteen tracks, about forty minutes in all, mix Korean children's songs and lullabies, credited to Korean songwriters, with five pieces credited to Parks and Shin, one of them also to Curto. She dedicated the record to mothers and children everywhere, and its title honors her first daughter, Lua. Chung produced it; the mixing was done in Oslo by Chung, Manfred Eicher and Jan Erik Kongshaug.

Reviews were warm. Adrian Pallant of London Jazz News wrote in January 2014 that her voice moves from warm and bright to breathy and childlike, that Parks's restrained piano and Curto's accordion complete a well-balanced forty minutes, and that he recommended it fervently. ECM's page also collects favorable notices from Jazz Journal, The Jazz Breakfast and the Northern Echo. Her track "Lullaby" was chosen for Re: Seoul (ECM 2365, 2013), a sampler compiled for an ECM exhibition in Seoul, and on April 23, 2014 she played a release concert with Parks and Curto at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.

Her later credits are as a guest. She sings "Love Trauma" on the bassist Joonsam's A Door (Origin Records, 2016, recorded May 10, 2014), with Parks on piano, and Discogs lists her as a member of the Gero Hensel Ensemble, whose album Reminiscence (TCB, released November 7, 2025, recorded November 20 and 21, 2021) has her on vocals alongside the trumpeter and composer Gero Hensel, the pianist Vitaly Burtsev, the bassist Nils Kugelmann and the drummer Flurin Mück. She has released two albums under her own name. Where she lives now has not been published.

Her jazz identity rests on repertoire: the Brazilian songbook of Jobim, Nascimento, Barroso, Caymmi and Gismonti, sung in Portuguese over a New York jazz rhythm section, and then a set of Korean children's songs in gentle, largely improvised trio settings. Discogs files the first album under Bossa Nova, Free Improvisation and Latin Jazz, and Lua ya under Contemporary Jazz. Her own account is that Brazilian music was a path she was guided to by Chung, and that living overseas made her more attracted to traditional Korean music; in the 2011 interview she said her Korean roots affect everything she does, down to how she sits on the floor, and that she planned to look for related materials on her next visit to Korea.

The pop career that began her public life, with the 2002 album Lovely, is in the past; her work since 2004 has been jazz and Brazilian music, and the JoongAng Daily presented her as a jazz vocalist, not a pop singer who had crossed over. Kyunghyang's 2011 article placed her with Woongsan, Malo and Nah Youn-sun as a younger Korean jazz singer.