ACC Future Prize 2026: YoungEun Kim

ACC Future Prize is the National Asian Culture Center’s award program for interdisciplinary artistic practices. Through a competitive selection process, it recognizes promising artists in the field and supports the production and exhibition of new work. Held biennially, the second edition of the ACC Future Prize 2026 presents To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds by the award recipient, YoungEun Kim.

YoungEun Kim’s practice explores narratives marginalized by the history of ocularcentrism through sound and listening, situating them within broader social and historical contexts. Centering aural experience, her work investigates both sound and listening as modes of artistic and critical practice. Her recent projects examine distinctive modes of listening shaped by histories of migration, using a wide range of aural events—from language and music to the sounds of everyday life—as the point of departure.

To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds is an exhibition that explores the histories of movement and migration in Asia through sound, inviting visitors to experience them with the full range of their senses. Employing Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) and an immersive spatial audio system, the exhibition creates a multilayered soundscape in which diverse voices move, overlap, and resonate throughout the space. These voices originate in poems from the past that give expression to the experiences and emotions of movement and migration shaped by Asia’s complex histories, including colonial violence and war.

The exhibition begins with the artist’s questions: How do the experiences and emotions of the modern migration resonate with poems of the past? How might the sounds of the past give rise to a new sonic realism in the present? Weaving together histories of movement and migration through sound, the exhibition imagines a new sonic landscape of Asia. At the same time, it repositions the act of listening as a mode of critical inquiry, inviting audiences to imagine the future possibilities that acts of listening may yet open.

Exhibition Map

A. The exhibition in the ACC Creation Space 1 begins at the ACC Theater (B4).
B. Take the escalator upstairs to continue your visit to the other exhibitions.
C. Continue up the escalator to the mezzanine behind the B2 elevator, where you can enjoy an overview of the exhibition as a whole.

1. YoungEun Kim, To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds, 2026, 115.4-channel sound, 3-channel video, lighting, 60 min. ACC commission.
2. Research Archive for the New Commission
3. Earlier Works

This exhibition is a large-scale sound installation realized through a 115.4-channel audio system.

The numerous loudspeakers suspended above the exhibition space form a spatial audio system, designed using immersive audio technology. The system enables sound to move throughout the space in three dimensions, so visitors experience continuously shifting sound as they move through the exhibition.

In addition, the Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) system installed on stands along both sides of the exhibition space uses an array of loudspeakers to reproduce sound waves, generated from a virtual sound source. Because the perceived position and direction of the sound remain stable even as listeners move, the system creates the impression that the sound source physically exists within the exhibition environment.