YoungEun Kim at SONGEUN – Artforum International
Introduced on the newly inaugurated constructing of SONGEUN in Seoul’s Gangnam district, YoungEun Kim’s most up-to-date solo present, “Frames of Sound,” mines the historical past of South Korea to talk to the methods during which music migrates and the way this circulation can articulate the intricate entanglement of imperial histories, aesthetic schooling, and the sensing topic.
The works on this exhibition probe how sonic and acoustic cultures have been remodeled by the violence of colonial ventures. The seventeen-minute video Sensible A (all works cited, 2022) gives an account of the arrival of the primary piano in Daegu, South Korea, which was introduced by an American missionary. The piano was used to introduce the pitch A, the usual by which devices are conventionally tuned. In Ear Coaching, Kim considers the collision of aesthetic schooling with Korea’s army historical past. The work simulates pitch-perception workout routines that had been designed in Japan through the nation’s occupation of Korea: College students and armed forces officers had been made to hearken to the drone of military planes and requested to notate what sounds they heard. A Story of Oseonbo: Sounds Misplaced in Translation explores the shift from gueum, a symbol-based grammar for music notation, to the extra inflexible and summary staff-based system used within the West. The transfer away from the Korean vernacular acoustic annotation in flip affected what tones may be heard and appreciated.
In different works, Kim gestures to the primary recording of a Korean conventional tune, which was documented by American anthropologist Alice Fletcher in 1896. Fletcher’s crew captured the sound utilizing a cylinder that prints notational marks on a wax floor; over time, these marks fade, leading to discordant noise. For the one channel video, To Future Listeners I, the artist tried to retrieve music from the same wax cylinder by subjecting the sound to a noise discount app. In To Future Listeners II, the artist sings the tune in her personal voice, her works forcing us to listen to the dissonances within the histories of sound in South Korea.
— Carlos Quijon, Jr
