GWANGJU — The Asia Culture Center is opening a large-scale sound installation by artist Kim Young-eun, who explores narratives left out of vision-centered history through sound and listening.
The Asia Culture Center said "2026 ACC Future Prize: Kim Young-eun — To Future Listeners: Moving Sounds" will run at Complex Exhibition Hall 1 from the 3rd through Feb. 14, 2027.
The show features the artist selected for the ACC Future Prize, now in its second year. The prize is the center's flagship program, identifying artists who have built original bodies of work in convergence art and supporting the production and exhibition of new pieces.
Kim won the ACC Future Prize last October. She was then named the recipient of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's Artist of the Year award in February, drawing attention from the art world in Korea and abroad.
Kim has addressed the meaning of sound and listening in social and historical contexts, centering on auditory experience. The exhibition's centerpiece, "To Future Listeners: Moving Sounds," is a large-scale sound installation that lets visitors experience movement and migration in Asia through sound.
The exhibition space measures 25 meters wide, 60 meters deep and 15 meters high. A total of 115 speakers are installed on the ceiling and floor. The work is designed so that sound travels throughout the entire space.
Inside the hall, visitors can experience sound that wraps around and moves past them, not only through hearing but through bodily sensation.
The voices heard in the space begin from experiences of movement and migration in Asian history. Poems from the past that captured the emotions of displacement amid colonial violence, war and other complex histories form the basis of the work.
Kim focused on the fact that poems of the past were passed down through traditions of recitation. To reconstruct that lost vocality in contemporary terms, she researched poems and recitation materials and consulted experts. Building on that, she collaborated with composers to propose a new sonic landscape of Asia.
Nine pieces based on nine poems play on a 60-minute loop in the exhibition hall. Among them is Heo Gyun's "Nogaekbuwon," a 48-line classical Chinese poem recounting the story of an old woman the writer met at an inn in Cheorwon while traveling to Mount Kumgang during the Japanese invasions of Korea. The composer reinterpreted the era and the poem's sentiment through tone and melody, reworking it into a new piece titled "Heo Gyun, Reciting, Nogaekbuwon."
Three large screens showing lines from the poems are installed alongside the sound. Lighting design is also used to present the sonic landscape Kim proposes in three dimensions.
Kim Sang-wook, president of the Asia Culture Center, said he hopes the exhibition becomes an occasion for a mid-career Korean artist to grow into a world-class master. "It will be a special time for visitors to sense Asian history through sound and to imagine the future that listening can open," he said.
Kim Young-eun was born in Seoul and graduated from the sculpture department of Hongik University's College of Fine Arts, then studied for a master of fine arts in the Department of Art at the Korea National University of Arts. She completed a sonology program at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, the Netherlands, and is currently a doctoral candidate in film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her previous honors include an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica and the grand prize at the SongEun Art Award.
