Artist: YoungEun Kim

YoungEun Kim’s practice examines how sound has been constituted and technologically developed within specific social, political, and historical contexts. Central to her work is the development of listening as a critical and embodied mode of practice.

In her early works, Kim experimented with performance, video, installation, and drawing, focusing on sound’s inherent qualities of immateriality and non-referentiality. This approach is exemplified in The Units of The World According to ;Semicolon (2011), Bespoke Wallpaper Music (2014), and $1’s Worth (2016). Initially drawing on a methodology of sonic ethnography informed by her own experience of movement and migration, Kim later shifted her attention to the social and political significance of particular sounds, investigating the intersections of sound’s sensory and historical dimensions. Her work examines how practices of listening were shaped through modernization, colonialism, and militarism, to uncover how the enduring traces of these histories remain embedded in contemporary listening practices. This line of inquiry culminated in works such as Guns and Flowers (2017) and Red Noise Visit (2018), which approach sound and listening as historical formations. Kim’s research into listening practices in modern Korean history later expanded into an investigation of traditions lost through the process of modernization. Works including Brilliant A (2022), Ear Training (2022), A Story of Oseonbo: Sounds Lost in Translation (2022), and To Future Listeners I (2022) examine the disappearance of sonic traditions alongside the dominance of western musical standards.

Her recent practice traces the distinctive modes of listening shaped by the historical experiences of migrant communities. This trajectory is reflected in Listening Guests (2025), Go Back To Your (2025), and To Future Listeners III (2025), while the present exhibition further extends these ongoing inquiries.

For Kim, sound is not an object of aesthetic contemplation. Rather, it serves as a medium through which forgotten histories and lived experiences can be revisited through listening, beyond the visual frameworks that have long structured human history. Employing sonic ethnography as a methodological framework, she foregrounds the critical potential of sound within the representation and documentation of cultural ethnography. Kim’s work does not simply seek to reconstruct the sounds of the past. Instead, it asks how new forms of sonic realism might be constituted under present conditions, and how listening can open new possibilities for knowledge production and decolonization.

Kim is the recipient of the 2025 Korea Artist Prize (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea); the 2026 ACC Future Prize (National Asian Culture Center, Korea); the 2023 Korean Competition Short Winner (Jecheon International Music & Film Festival, Korea); the 2020 City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (United States); the 2017 Grand Prize (SONGEUN Art Award, Korea); the 2017 Honorary Mentions (Prix Ars Electronica, Austria); and the 2014–2015 Mondriaan Fund Fellowship (Netherlands).

Her works are held in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan; the Seoul Museum of Art; the Busan Museum of Art; the Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Sigg Collection, Switzerland.