To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds, 2026.

To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds is an exhibition that invites audiences to experience the histories of movement and migration in Asia through listening. While it reconstructs the sounds of historical poetry recitations, the work is not a simple recreation of the past. Instead, it responds to the absence of an original sonic source by drawing on philological inquiry and surviving traditions of oral recitation proposing a new sonic landscape for Asia.

For this project, YoungEun Kim begins with poems that give voice to the experiences of movement and migration shaped by Asia’s complex histories of colonialism and war. Focusing on the vocality of poetic recitation, she reimagines the sounds of the past in a contemporary form. Spanning from antiquity to the modern era, the poems are spoken by voices that sing their stories while fleeing war, living in exile, crossing the sea, or dwelling at the borders. Their narratives reveal the possibility of solidarity from the shared condition of being human, prior to the distinctions of nation and ethnicity. Yet history has largely been recorded through the authority of the nation-state and ethnic identity, and within a hierarchy of the senses in which vision has long dominated other senses. By setting aside these structures of power, the artist listens anew to histories that have long-since remained unheard.

In reconstructing these voices, Kim unearths poems that were once orally transmitted and circulated through traditions of oral recitation. More than simply reading aloud, recitation was a mode of learning embodied through breath and auditory rhythm, and served as a primary method by which scholars memorized classical texts and literature. Over centuries, however, this tradition gradually declined as a result of the combined effects of colonial rule and modernization, leaving few traces of its original vocal practice today. Through archival research, philological investigation, and consultation with specialists, Kim assembles the historical evidence needed to infer the vocal qualities of these lost recitation traditions. Based on this research, each poem is entrusted to a composer who is both rooted in the linguistic and cultural contexts of the original poem, and who has themselves experienced migration, enabling the poems to be voiced anew through contemporary sound.

The exhibition brings together a total of nine poems, each interpreted by one of nine composers and presented as immersive sounds through a 115.4-channel loudspeaker system. Within this expansive sonic environment, visitors encounter the work through the act of listening with their entire bodies, forming an affective resonance with the poems’ speakers. Although the installation presents reconstructed sounds inspired by historical recitation, reconstruction itself is not its ultimate aim. Because the complete restoration of the original voices is impossible, the sounds that flow throughout the exhibition become something entirely new—a contemporary sonic landscape of Asia. In this way, the work invites us to imagine the future possibilities that the act of listening may yet open.