“Nothing looks the way it sounds. And nothing sounds the way it looks.”

Christina Kubisch

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Auditory sources such as the sounds of rain, wind, bonfire, whisper, or caress can cause a response similar to synesthesia. Those everyday environmental sounds trigger our sensory experiences. Countless aural stimuli around us have no shapes but suddenly take us to an estranged domain as in ASMR that has gained much interest and popularity recently.

GalleryJJ is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Youngsup Kim, well-known for his installation that visualizes sound. This exhibition, Cable Ceramics and Sounds II, is a new venture for us in terms of it being the first sound installation at GalleryJJ, and considering Kim is a so-called museum-level artist who has only exhibited in museums thus far. Cable Ceramics and Sound series were introduced in 2006 in Germany, Paris, Vienna, Luxembourg, and Toronto, and in 2007 in Seoul. Compared to his previous work, this exhibition has more layers of sounds recorded by the latest equipment, and visually, the artificial smoothness evoked by objets’ rich colors and various shapes attracts our attention.

Kim pays attention to our aural surroundings we can barely notice. He studied audiovisual art in Germany under the supervision of first-generation sound artist Christina Kubisch where he continued to show interest in the comprehensive interrelationship of time, space, and materials through image, music, and noise. By collecting, arranging, and visualizing the sounds of daily life, his work is read conceptually in various ways in a socio-cultural context with conflicting reciprocity among images, sounds, and materials. 

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Looking at his past works, for instance, the noises that dominate cities in re-play (2013) construct an autocratic narrative, and the voice recording in Inter-view: Binding Dreams (2009) reveals the uniformity caused by social institutions and customs. New Memories of the Garden (2008) visualizes the sounds that govern daily life without perceivable forms; gulp! gulp! gulp! (2008) combines the desire of people today with the clicks of a mouse; Forest (2007) presents the babbling from ads and information. We can now picture the underlying thoughts in his work. They refer to how the excess noises subconsciously latent in modern urban society dictate the space and metaphorically denote the current ecology of our lives stereotyped within socio-cultural norms. His work delves into our cognitive system towards a conceptual realization with an expanded sense from the synergy between sight and hearing.

“My work questions how customs, institutions, and information unconsciously accepted in everyday life affect our perceptions and emotions. Those rules in modern society provide us comfort and familiarity, but on the flip side, some kind of arbitrary or other compulsions lurk. Especially, even the various sounds now that pass by or whose identity is unknown have a close relationship with them.”

- Artist’s Note

Kim balances sound art and visual art domains by a format that runs parallel with sound and installation, taxonomically speaking. Music and noise have already become a medium of art starting at the beginning of the last century, led by the Futurist Manifesto and Duchamp's conceptual sound work. Since then, it leaps forward with the rise of conceptualism, and in particular, sound visualization has been developed much in the field of media art. Sensibility in art is of theoretical senses, visual and aural, according to Hegel, and their combination is anticipated under this idealistic thinking where only the two can attain meanings. The rendezvous of art and technology is crucial in media art. However, it seems that Kim’s audiovisual work is more focused on giving new interpretation and meaning via inconsistency between the sound and visual images rather than technical glitz. 

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Image-Sound Objet_ at the junction of daily life and art

The noises that consistently resonate around us but not easily perceived are selectively collected and processed for the context in this exhibition to present them as tangible visual objects. Upon entering the space, visitors encounter several pottery-shaped objets where the sound originates. It becomes a minimalist landscape based on repetition and playback.

Cable ceramics are created by rolling up cables as a kind of sound-objet in this audiovisual environment. Several records of elusive noises from household goods are mixed and rearranged in these objets with an elongated beat of Ochaejilgut in Samulnori, a kind of Korean traditional percussion act. This mix is composed of a two-channel surround-sound to echo concurrently in the exhibition space. This exhibition also includes musical scores and drawings created by the artist expressing the image of the sound.

Our current sensibility accustomed to the finicky digital world gets lost in between the smooth eye-catching objets and the unknown analog sound with a consistently dawdling tempo. At the crossroads between seeing and listening, where do our perception, memory, time, and space move toward? We can then ask about the relationship among the image of ceramics, the mixed noises, cable as the material, and the happenings in this environment.

Cables are ordinary expendables used to transmit sound and charge electricity, but once the archetypal form of ceramics is granted, they become art objet. Likewise, the ceramics in this show as a representative image used to be handy domestic goods in the form of earthenware or crocks with twelve different functions such as storage, transportation, heating, and so on. However, the easy-to-use products with current technologies have replaced such functions, and ceramics have become objects of art or subject to stare in art galleries and museums.

The sound also can be discussed in this context. His sound is composed of the subtle noises coming out of those goods we use now in place of the old functions of ceramics, such as refrigerator, rice cooker, radiator, or washer. Ochaejilgut that he takes as the base rhythm, used to be popular music in everyday life, but now it has become stage music. Many things change their meaning according to the times and cultures, and we posit different perspectives. All components of his work - cables, representation of images, and sound – create an association with each other, crossing the boundary between daily life and art, and this unexpected harmony makes a transition and implication to new values.

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Material, Manifestation

Cables are an important component in Kim’s work along with speakers and collected sounds. He does not hide cables but actively uses and reveal them physically and conceptually. In this exhibition, they are not only a medium with a practical function of transmitting sound but also a material of form-giving. They transform into articles with a reproducible character, such as bowls, vases, and earthenware that contain sound. These objets we see as ceramic objects are not actual ceramics, but only images that we perceive as ceramics in our notions.

This treachery of the image inevitably directs our attention to the colored cables placed before our eyes. Cables have gained more and more important recently as industry and communication development accelerate. The material of new ceramics as sound objets is not soil, but these cables. The color of the objets is also colorful and smooth, giving them a kitsch sense, and the physical properties of the material itself stand out, emphasizing synthetic resin and artificial plastic.

The transposition between soil and cables may be a sign of the reality that everyday spaces are ubiquitously occupied by objects made of plastic rather than elements of nature. The sound of cable-objet is not nature, but an artificial noise created and nurtured by humans. Consumables that are easily discarded after mass consumption generates tremendous artificial sounds. Once we trace those that he utilizes as sound sources, we encounter the excess materials left by Anthropocene such as plastic, concrete, and aluminum – the hyperobjects. This suggests critical thinking about the artificial remnants penetrating our senses and current problems on the flip side of technological advancement.

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Manipulated sound environment  

In sound work, the sources are selected and collected like matters in everyday life. With the collected raw sounds, Kim composes a new environment through subtle manipulations in the volume, flow, and pitch. His ability to compose, rearrange, and write music scores using Samulnori tempo comes from his experience in Pungmulnori over the past ten years. The score with his notation system depicts the image of sound as a structural sketch of the auditory dimension. As if it were a conventional composition, all sounds are precisely noted.

Making sheet music with such precision means that he plans and deploys sound thoroughly. Samulnori tempo is converted into a new sound by combining the noises of everyday products. The collected sounds contain the situation at the time of their occurrence, and concurrently, they interact with the form of ceramics within the present context which creates a strange dissonance. Through such an unfamiliar juxtaposition, he directs all devices and environments to intervene with each other, putting the viewers in a kind of absurd theatrical situation. This stage triggers unfamiliar experiences to our familiar senses. Countless noises floating in our everyday space, and the things in our latent cognition that could not attain definitions, come and go between memory and perception.

The exhibition awakens the sound environment in which we are unconsciously exposed and allows us to reflect on certain living conditions already given to us by society. The intricate combination of objects and sounds that fall into uniform and endless self-replication is nothing but a series of symptoms in contemporary society.

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- Julie Kang, GalleryJJ Director

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