Earlier Works: Tracing YoungEun Kim's Exploration of Sound and Listening

This space offers an overview of YoungEun Kim’s artistic journey leading up to the present exhibition. From her early work The Units of The World According to ;Semicolon (2011), which explores the arbitrariness of “sound” and “signs,” to her reorientation from visual space to auditory space in the performance Bespoke Wallpaper Music (2014), to Red Noise Visit (2018)—an expansion ofthis inquiry into historical contexts to reveal sound as a political construct, and Brilliant A (2022), which traces the processes through which western musical standards first obtained dominance, the exhibition traces the artist’s enduring practice of listening to forgotten or unheard sounds through the framework of auditory perception, as a means to fill the gaps in human history.

The Units of the World According to; Semicolon

2011
Single-channel video, stereo sound
25 min. 54 sec.

In The Units of The World According to ;Semicolon, twelve punctuation marks—including the colon (:), quotation marks (“ ”), hyphen (-), ellipsis (…), and parentheses ( )—appear, each accompanied by a name and a visual form, but no sound. By giving voice to these marks, which occupy specific roles within a sentence yet always remain unspoken, the artist evokes imagined sonic entities from their visual forms. The semicolon (;) comes to life as a distinct persona and the narrator of the entire story, intimately recounting the inner lives of its fellow punctuation marks. This narrative is delivered through polyphonic and unstable voices, as the text is read aloud by non-Korean-speaking readers who do not fully comprehend the meaning of the Korean sentences in the script. The arbitrariness of sound and signs is reinforced by suspending language’s function of conveying meaning and reducing utterance to sound alone.
Towards the end of the piece, all the backgrounds where the twelve punctuation marks appeared are shown sequentially as empty spaces without characters. In contrast, the choir-like sound of all the punctuation marks fills the screen.

Bespoke Wallpaper Music

2014
Video documentation of sound performance
16 min

This work is a video documenting a sound performance held at the Solomon Building in Hwanghak-dong, Seoul, home to a vast secondhand market. Hwanghak-dong Market was once known as the “last market,” a place where objects that had outlived their original usefulness eventually ended up. Unlike the bustle of the market outside, the Solomon Building is a space where entering the interior reveals an unexpected visual separation. Small rooms that were once used as shops are layered and concealed behind walls throughout the building. On the first floor, rooms shaped like slices of cake are arranged side by side behind fan-shaped walls, while an elevator travels between the first and sixth floors along the spaces behind the doors and walls. On the sixth floor, five rooms are situated behind the walls around a large central space. The artist discovers in this visually obstructed environment the possibility of reimagining it as an “aural space.” Having experienced through her earlier work how sound can reveal the physical identity of invisible spaces and the narratives of place embedded within them, she conceived a sound performance centered on walls and voices.
The performance unfolded as follows: the performers were each positioned in hidden spaces where they could neither see nor touch one another, and continued to perform by relying on the faint sounds of the other performers and remote signals from the conductor. The audience could not see the performers, but instead had to locate them through sound, imagining and interpreting the spaces they occupied

Brilliant A

2022
Single-channel video, stereo sound
16 min. 56 sec.

This work traces the history of A (La), the musical note that serves as a standard pitch, conventionally set at 440 Hz, and has become the standard for tuning most modern musical instruments, including orchestral instruments. It examines the gradual upward adjustment of A in accordance with a human preference for increasingly “brilliant” sounds. This shift appears to have been influenced by competition among instrument makers seeking to increase profits through brighter sounds, as well as by the practices of European and American military bands, which sought to project sound over greater distances in order to boost the morale of their troops. The work also reconstructs the moment when the standard pitch A was introduced to Korea. Drawing on early twentieth-century historical accounts of the first piano brought to the Daegu region by an American missionary, it recreates the journey of the piano as it was transported to Korea. The introduction of the piano marked a significant turning point in the transformation of theories and sensibilities surrounding sound that had been embedded in the auditory perception of Koreans at the time. It also gave rise to various auditory conflicts in the process through which an ear attuned to traditional music was transformed into one attuned to Western music. Through this reconstruction, the work explores the symbolic significance of the arrival in Korea of the Western-style piano that “carried” the A note with it.

Red Noise Visit

2018
Single-channel video, stereo & binaural sound
12 min. 14 sec.

This work examines two contrasting types of sound that were present in Korea throughout the modern and contemporary periods. One is the sound of sirens. Remembered as the noon and curfew sirens, these sounds functioned throughout the Japanese colonial period, the U.S. military government period, the Korean War, and the years of dictatorship: during the day, they synchronized the daily rhythms of a working population; at night, they served to maintain public order. Among these forms of state-imposed temporal discipline, the nighttime curfew controlled individuals’ physical spaces and time, remaining in place for more than three decades. In Osu-myeon, Imsil-gun, Jeollabuk-do, stands one of the tallest surviving red-brick watchtowers. Built during the Japanese colonial period to monitor local residents, it was repurposed as a siren tower after liberation. The siren that once sounded from this tower is remembered by local residents alongside the tower’s imposing presence. The narrative in the work begins with their memories of the siren that emanated from the tower, and gradually expands into stories of the curfew siren.
The other is the sound of the radio. Once darkness fell following the curfew siren, radio broadcasts drew together hidden listeners. At times, these transmissions were propaganda broadcasts deliberately crossing the boundary between North and South; at other times, they were regular broadcasts that happened to cross the border. During the era of anti-communism, listening to radio broadcasts that blurred territorial boundaries was illegal, making listening an experience that was always secretive and deeply personal. The work recounts the sonic memories of an individual who, while engaged in espionage activities in the late 1960s, listened to South Korean broadcasts from the North. Radio signals that crossed the border in this way were referred to in a newspaper at the time as “red noise.”
While one form of “red noise” descended vertically to impose temporal control, the other penetrated horizontally, traversing spatial boundaries. What traces did the siren—an instrument of oppression that compelled collective listening—leave on individual lives? And what emotions and imaginative possibilities did the radio, listened to in secrecy and solitude, evoke? To approach these sounds of the past, which lie beyond the realm of direct perception, the artist researched memories of sirens and radio transmissions, as well as narratives found in news reports, interviews, and essays based on events of the time. Selected and adapted passages from these materials are woven into the narrative of the video. The texts shift between speakers and across times and spaces as they recount stories of sirens and radio, while reconstructed sounds of sirens and radio—created through voices, sound effects, and field recordings—intersect throughout the narrative.