At the Asia Culture Center, ‘Invisible’ Sound Takes Center Stage

Voices reciting poems from across Asia fill the National Asian Culture Center, yet the source of the sound cannot be seen. Instead, 115 speakers send it moving through the exhibition space.

“To Future Listeners: Moving Sound,” created by artist Kim Young-eun, runs from the 3rd through February 14 next year. The project was selected for the Asia Culture Center’s ACC Future Prize, which supports the production and exhibition of new work.

Kim’s exhibition explores sound culture that has been marginalized by a history centered on sight. Speakers installed across the ceiling and floor of the 25-meter-wide, 60-meter-long and 15-meter-high exhibition hall create the effect of sound traveling three-dimensionally through the entire space. Visitors can feel the audio surround their bodies as it moves.

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Sound-based exhibitions have become more common recently, and the Culture Center’s creative production center has a spatial-audio production room that can realize the technologies artists envision.

A large screen displays lines of poetry while red and blue lighting changes create an accompanying acoustic landscape. Kim selected nine poems on “movement and migration in Asia” shaped by colonial violence and war, turning them into nine sound works that play in a 60-minute cycle. One featured work draws on Heo Gyun’s “The Old Woman at the Guesthouse,” a long classical Chinese poem about the miserable story of an elderly woman he met at an inn in Cheorwon while traveling toward Mount Geumgang during the Imjin War.

The center has also prepared route guidance for visually impaired visitors and vibrating vests that transmit low-frequency sound through vibration for hearing-impaired visitors. Center director Kim Sang-wook said the facility’s spatial-audio production room allows artists to realize the technologies they envision. Kim Young-eun, who participated in the 2024 Gwangju Biennale, said she prepared the exhibition to coincide with the 16th Biennale and hoped visitors would experience both events together.

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I prepared the exhibition to coincide with the 16th Gwangju Biennale, and I hope visitors will enjoy the works at both the Biennale and the Culture Center together.