There was also a special quality to our wind. [...] Eventually, my ear would become attuned to background noise. And even, or perhaps especially, when you are explicitly taught to keep quiet and not ask too many questions, you can’t resist pulling on that thread of familiar silence once the edges of the fabric have begun to fray.
— Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora

YoungEun Kim has, for the past twenty years, shared a multidisciplinary practice that inaugurates intimate contact with Korean histories of sound. Employing “sonic ethnography,” the sounds collected and staged across her expansive portfolio elaborate the complex psychic, sensory, and historical specificities of time and place.

Pulling on the threads of Korean legacies of militarism, migration, and diasporic relationalities, sound fills the gaps in perforated narratives disavowed by colonial violences, processes of modernization and their concomitant sensory hierarchies. Across the work, Kim’s conceptual interventions antagonize Western regimes of perception that overemphasize vision as the locus of knowledge.

Alongside her critique of the hegemony of vision, Kim also importantly draws attention to how listening modalities are inscribed by racialized logics. Emerging from these inquiries is a vigorous archive of aurality that reveals sound as a quotidian remnant of often suppressed or underrecognized sociopolitical and historical contexts.

For Kim, the sonic paradigm offers ethnographic entry points through which audiences might differently attune to what Grace M. Cho might describe as “the edges of the fabric [that] have begun to fray.” It is precisely within the fray of colonial imposition that sound resonates, and listening becomes a form of imagining and enacting otherwise.

Scholars and artists alike have argued that listening is more than focused attention; it is also a process of becoming aware of how ideology may creep into the act of listening itself. Xochitl Marsili-Vargas suggests that “while listening is an act of interpretation, it also entails occupying a particular social space, a way of being in the world.”

The listener’s context is distinct and thus institutes agency over how a given sound is codified and represented. But listening to sound is not without ethics or responsibility. According to Kim, a question that guides her practice remains: “What possibilities can listening offer in knowledge production and decolonization processes?”

In many of her works, Kim’s “sonic ethnographies” seek to represent, with care and fidelity, the overlaps of history and acts of political dissent that resonate beyond official state narratives. Notably, this methodology observes sounds in all modalities, from text to music to environmental and paralinguistic.

Throughout her practice, Kim assigns unique significance and transformative potential to sounds thought to have none or that evade the immediacies of legibility.

What can Sound?: Exploring “Phonic Substance”

Lesson for a Naming Office: Three Treatments (2009) is a book that contains treatments for three videos created by Kim between 2009 and 2011. Conventionally, a treatment is a written document describing a video project’s overall concept, storyline, and stylistic approach. The treatment is also an opportunity to introduce characters and share narrative details before production.

This book and its related video trilogy feature unlikely protagonists in the form of punctuation, speech utterance, and phonetic signs. For example, In “Chapter 1: Oral Ground” (2009), text is laid out like a novel. The opening line reads: “Drrrrrrrrr –” The lines that follow describe a child making sounds with their tongue to mark the beginning of a game.

The word “magma” is introduced and then repeated fifteen times successively. The last line on the page reads: “The word gradually loses its meaning as much as it is repeated.” According to the artist, in this chapter, each page documents an event scene that showcases a sound, a sign, a phonetic symbol, and their related signified object, all derived from a single word.

The withholding of pragmatics and the airiness on the page encourage co-authorship with its audience. “Magma” becomes a shapeshifting protagonist whose plotline is indeterminate without our participation. The performative frame loosens the relationship between sound, sign, word, and referent, creating opportunities for different stories or relations to the work to emerge.

In the treatment for “Chapter 3: The Units of the World According to ;Semicolon” (2011), the protagonist, the semicolon, is tasked with formulating a report on its fellow punctuation marks. Each punctuation mark (for example, the hyphen or ellipsis) demarcates specific roles and functions within a sentence.

However, punctuation marks are soundless despite their formative impact on language and how it is communicated and comprehended. One page describes semicolon’s encounter with colon; “It was easy to meet him. As he was living near me, I come across him from time to time. […] I was once seriously jealous of him.

He was doing a sacred job of designating John 3:16 or Romans 5:18.” By ascribing voice and character to punctuation marks, Kim culls “phonic substance” from the image of words and signs. Stretching the imagination, the semicolon is filled with personality, offering the audience intimate insights into the protagonist’s ideologies and psychic life.

Through this challenge of semiotics and its sensory constraints, the sounds and signs that constitute language are emphasized as flexible social and material forces. When manipulated, the arbitrariness of their relations is exposed, and the “almost the same, but not quite” of linguistic hegemony is playfully enacted.

(Re)sounding History

In 2014, from September 28 to December 14, the Umbrella Movement staged a seventy-nine-day pro-democracy occupation of Hong Kong’s commercial districts. The opening of umbrellas to shield from police pepper spray and tear gas would become a lasting signification of the protestors’ sustained and non-violent actions.

As with most protests, demonstration sites are often sonically animated by speeches, activist chants and political slogans. However, an unlikely sonic tactic emerged when a protester, intent on diffusing tensions between demonstrators and disgruntled opposition, accidentally activated a rendition of the song “Happy Birthday” over their megaphone.

The accident is met with a momentary hush from the crowd, followed by spontaneous applause and the singing of “Happy Birthday” in Cantonese, until the counter-protesters leave the scene. This “nonsensical soundscape” would become a global political strategy for protestors to de-escalate potential violence and inspire the creation of Kim’s work titled Flesh of Sound (2015–2019).

Described by Kim as “a small, accidental event [that] gained symbolic power through the collective voice,” Flesh of Sound examines the recontextualization of “Happy Birthday” as an immaterial sound that, through collective participation, is transformed into an embodied tool of resistance.

A recording begins with a single voice humming the melody of “Happy Birthday.” Repeating at regular intervals, the voice is gradually overlapped to accumulate and form a chorus of voices. With each additional recording, the once singular voice grows in depth, weight, and dynamics. “Happy Birthday” and its association with celebration are transformed through contextual incongruence and collective expression.

The materiality of collective voices is examined as a potent tool for mediating meaning. But in this context, the fleshiness of sound is recalcitrant; it makes meaning possible but does not create it. The fortuitous mistake of a mispressed button and the collective singing that followed illustrate that it is through corporeality and the specificity of context that the signification of the song and the voices that sing it are transformed.

Winnie W. C. Lai shares that “dissenters have to recontextualize the sound with their current existence as physical bodies in the protest space. In other words, they must ruminate on their roles and actions as political participants.” In Flesh of Sound, the singular voice transforms into a collective body, and it is through the accumulation of voices that Kim gestures towards the sonics of political possibility.

While sonic ethnographies of resistance can be gleaned across YoungEun Kim’s catalogue, she does not take for granted that voice and sound are also tools used to fortify militarism and facilitate violence and war. In 2017, Kim exhibited Guns and Flowers (2017), a sound installation inspired by the loudspeaker systems that line Korea’s Demilitarized Zone DMZ, a heavily militarized de facto border between South and North Korea.

After the signing of the Korean War Armistice Agreement in 1953, which symbolically halted the war for control over the Korean Peninsula between Chinese and Soviet-backed communist forces in the north and the American-backed government in the south, the two Koreas remain in a latent state of conflict. Both North and South Korea maintain a significant military presence on either side.

Described by Kim as examples of “sonic warfare,” the two countries strategically positioned loudspeaker walls on opposing sides with the intent to transmit propaganda and blast sounds like music, global news, military marches and even the sound of howling wolves and the clang of gongs deep into opposing territory.

It has been reported that the high-powered speakers can project sound over a distance of more than twenty kilometers (12.4 miles). The sounds emitted by these speakers cannot be contained by the Military Demarcation Line MDL that partitions the north from the south. Sounds travel; they swell, diminish, and puncture.

They evade territories and enemy lines. Reverberations are indiscriminate (sometimes relentless) and will bombard regardless of content and form. Sound engages all the senses and lingers in the psyche. Its multisensory capacities call for attention to the body, posing inquiry into the felt dimensions of sound. Describing warfare as sensual seems counterintuitive, as it is a word often associated with experiencing pleasure.

But as Amber Musser argues, the sensual orients attention to “felt details” and the ways in which “flesh summons its own ways of knowing.” It is through full-body contact with sound that Kim elicits a more sensuous and synesthetic sensitivity in ethnographic engagements with borders.

In Guns and Flowers, Kim reconstructs a listening experience inspired by the weaponization of sound through the form of the popular love song. The incongruence between the widely perceived intent of love songs, as sounds that evoke emotional associations with romance, and the method and context in which they were deployed highlights how any sound can be mechanized to prompt sensations of fear and domination.

The installation features five horn speakers positioned atop speaker stands arranged in a V-like configuration. A four-minute loop constructed of sounds extracted from popular love songs used by the South Korean military is edited and rearranged. YoungEun Kim was particularly struck by how the loudspeakers created a material experience with these songs.

She describes these amplified sounds as “a tactile sensation with the energy of vibrating air working remotely to beat one’s eardrum—just as a bullet shot from a distance has a physical effect on its target.” The weaponization of these love songs physically impacted bystanders in their line of fire. Their melodies were blasted with such force that even as their aural qualities diminished, their vibrations lingered with the listeners’ bodies.

Nina Sun Eidsheim refers to sound as an “intermaterial vibrational practice” that shapes our relations to one another. The loudspeaker broadcasts created distress for soldiers and the people living in communities along the border. With Guns and Flowers, Kim reconstructs this sensory experience through the process of audio “sculpting.”

Using a spectrogram, which provides a visual representation of audio, Kim extracts frequencies from one of the love songs, resulting in an audio loop of fragmented and percussive sonic jolts that, at times, ring at discomforting levels. The sounds “attack” listeners at varying pitches and timbres, subverting any associations with love that the music may have originally intended.

The piece was received with critical acclaim and earned Kim the grand prize at the 17th SONGEUN Art Award, a prestigious annual accolade granted by the SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation.

“Ear Training”: Sound & Listening as Sociopolitical Terrain

In 2022, a series of works which includes Ear Training, A Story of Oseonbo: Sounds Lost in Translation, and Brilliant A, YoungEun Kim continues to examine the overlaps of histories of sound and listening as mediated by processes of modernization and colonial incursion.

In Ear Training, Kim grapples with Korea’s history of music education by staging pitch-perception exercises inspired by Japanese military training aimed at developing soldiers’ pitch and rhythm recognition of enemy airplanes and submarines. The reenactments draw from soldier scores, audio recordings, interviews, and academic research to recreate soundscapes experienced by the Japanese Army and Navy during its occupation of Korea.

Through the reconstruction of these exercises, Kim draws attention to the militarization of the senses as weapons of war. A Story of Oseonbo also turns to historical archives to highlight another form of perception training in Korea. The forty-seven-minute, single-channel video tells the story of the first scorebook that was transcribed by a Korean musician into Western notation in 1914.

The process of translation between these systems leaves the original score full of erasures and distorted interpretations. Turning to experts in traditional Korean music, Kim reassembles the compositional elements extracted through Western annotation. The audience is left with a powerful reminder that translations leave elisions shaped by cultural dynamics of power and engineered by histories of racialized dispossession and loss.

The institutionalization of Western music is also examined in the video Brilliant A. In its opening scene, a large wooden crate is tied with rope and pulled across the shore of a beach by an unknown force outside the frame. While this happens, a narrator shares: “March 26, arrived at Samun and the piano was already on shore, we were devoutly thankful for this.”

Drawing from a historical archive of early 20th century materials, the video recounts the arrival of the first piano in the city of Daegu, Korea, along with the introduction of the pitch system foundational to Western music. It’s widely believed that Western music was brought to Korea by Protestant missionaries near the end of the 19th century.

The piano was shipped via Samunjin Port to missionaries Richard and Effie Sidebotham. The instrument was referred to as “the ghost-barrel,” an allusion made by Korean bystanders about the “strange sounds” that were emitted by the wooden box.

Pitch A corresponds to an audio frequency of 440 Hz, which is the standard pitch preference for tuning most modern musical instruments. Tuning instruments to higher frequencies creates crisp and clear sounds. In line with Western preferences for “brighter” music, the piano and its related musical standards would shift taste and auditory preferences from Korean traditional music toward the modern standards of Europe and the United States.

The piano would symbolize a privileged elite in Korea and serve as a pathway supporting a political shift toward modernization. The instrument would also maintain an inseparable connection to missionary work and religious education. As a means of proselytizing, Western music played a role in Christianizing the country.

It would contribute to a process of training Koreans in music and Christian ideologies from the United States. In Brilliant A, Kim reconstructs a significant moment in history that points to some of the sociopolitical consequences of the piano’s emergence in Korea. The introduction of Western music altered Korea’s traditional values and would forever shape Korean experiences of sound and listening in the contemporary moment.

The global dominance of the piano, along with the sounds and education it embodies, is not an innocent figure in history but a “strange” cog of Western assimilation that, if attuned to differently, reveals sensory regimes of knowledge, prompting speculation about what has been lost and what could have been.

Listening to Diaspora

What listening genealogies emerge when sound is situated in time and space? How do we listen to histories of trauma, and what are ethical responses to its embodiment? What does diaspora sound like? Sounds carry data, and it is through listening that we process and communicate this information.

However, we know that listening is not a neutral act. Listening “is an interpretive, socially constructed practice conditioned by historically contingent and culturally specific value systems riven with power relations.” In Kim’s most recent work, the artist expands her sonic ethnographic approach to the Korean diaspora.

Focusing on language, music, and the everyday aural events of Korean diasporic communities, Kim considers how histories of migration produce distinct modalities of listening. Writing about the Korean diaspora in the United States and the aftermath of the Korean War, Grace M. Cho describes the Korean diaspora as “transgenerationally haunted.”

She writes that the Korean diaspora is “constituted by unremembered trauma and loss. When an unspeakable or uncertain history, both personal and collective, takes the form of a “ghost,” it searches for bodies through which to speak [and is] distributed across the time-space of diaspora.

Giving form and sound to traumatic histories of violence and displacement, Kim’s aesthetic practices communicate a multiplicity of narratives that point to the “haunted spaces” of Korean diasporic experiences.

Go Back To Your (2025) is a single-channel video that immerses its audience in the sounds of racist violence experienced by Korean women in America. In the soundscape, amidst the sounds of falling rain, a voice is heard shouting, “Go back to your country.” The protagonists’ response to this racist invocation is displayed as text.

She replies: “I hesitated for a moment, then walked toward you. You looked startled and took out your phone, threatening to call the police. I said, “I was born here.” The xenophobic call to return to a place one was never from is met with a response that, for the antagonist, provokes an unanticipated reaction that, coupled with her subjectivity, is also perceived as threatening.

The affective charge of the statement “I was born here” elicits a defiant impulse towards subjection. Koreans carry histories of militarized violence and trauma that have led to erasures and silences, conditioned by unspeakable loss.

Akin to Grace Cho’s methodology of writing to “flesh out the ghosts” of disavowed history, YoungEun Kim’s sonic ethnographies recognize that the trauma of racism is a “transgenerational haunting.” The text in Go Back To Your gives form to alterity and voices agencies that may have, in the past, been too painful to articulate.

For Kim, the soundscapes of the Korean diaspora urge listeners to jettison habitual modes of perception. These habits negate the ways in which diaspora disorders knowledge shaped by nationalist imaginaries. In the video titled Listening Guests (2025), Kim focuses on the diasporic experiences of members of the Koryoin (Soviet Korean) community in Korea and Korean immigrants in Los Angeles.

In one scene, two middle-aged men sit at a table, reflecting on the disjuncture between how they are socially perceived in Korea and how their histories of migration have made them otherwise. One of the men shares: “I’m Russian. I even dream in Russian. That means I’m not Korean—I’m truly Russian.”

Here, culture is described as a dissonant experience where the language one speaks and the rituals one enacts do not align with the normative expectations of assumed race and ethnicity. The man continues to describe the source of social perplexity: “We have to explain we’re foreigners. Sometimes people think we’re joking because we look Korean.

So, in the market, I say, “I’m a foreigner. My Korean is limited. Please understand,” before I speak…We were born in Russia, but don’t look like typical Russians…”

Koryoin are ethnic Koreans from the former Soviet Union. The first generation of Koryoin migrated to the Russian Far East, fleeing famine, exploitation, bureaucratic control and later Japanese occupation. With this wave of Korean migration, the Russian Far East became a bastion of Korean culture, politics and anti-Japanese resistance.

Following the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, Stalin perceived the Korean diaspora as a racialized threat to national security. In that same year, approximately 180,000 Koreans were forcibly deported to Central Asia by his regime. The Koryoin diaspora in Korea primarily comprises descendants who, following the establishment of official diplomatic relations between South Korea and the countries of the former Soviet Union, began migrating in the 1990s in search of improved economic opportunities.

For many second-generation Koryoins and the generations that follow, “race” ties them to a culture and geography with which they share a ghostly affiliation through ancestry alone.

The film shares their struggle to learn and speak the Korean language, a collection of sounds and symbols that, for them, mark contradictory terms of belonging to the diaspora. The sound of Russian explicitly marks them as foreigners in Korea, but it also connects them to history, family, and community.

In this work, along with many other pieces found in her archive, YoungEun Kim invites audiences to engage in critical listening practices that anchor sound in relationality. In Listening, Thinking, Being: Toward an Ethics of Attunement (2014), Lisbeth Lipari writes that it “requires courage to listen for the not-already-known, and in so doing, reveal our own particular vulnerability and weakness.”

Following Kim, if we take the ethnographic capacities of sound seriously, we might bravely confront the humbling realization of our ignorance. It is from these frays of knowledge that more ethical approaches to how we sense and make sense of others enable new and, hopefully, more just forms of being together.

References

• [비평] 김영은과 경계의 청취
  [Critique] YoungEun Kim and Sounding the Fray