YoungEun Kim—To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds

The National Asian Culture Center presents To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds, a new commission by YoungEun Kim, for the second edition of the ACC Future Prize. Awarded biennially, the prize recognizes promising artists working in interdisciplinary practices and supports the production and exhibition of new works.

The exhibition explores the histories of movement and migration in Asia through sound, inviting visitors to experience them with the full range of their senses. Employing Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) and an immersive spatial audio system, it creates a multilayered soundscape in which diverse voices move, overlap, and resonate throughout the space. These voices originate in poems from the past that give expression to the experiences and emotions of movement and migration shaped by Asia's complex histories, including colonial violence and war. 

Spanning centuries, from ancient times to the modern era, the poems are carried by voices that sing their stories while fleeing war, living in exile, crossing the sea, or dwelling at the borders. Their narratives reveal the possibility of solidarity from the shared condition of being human, prior to the distinctions of nation and ethnicity. Yet history has largely been recorded through the authority of the nation-state and ethnic groups, and within a hierarchy of the senses in which vision has long dominated. By setting aside these structures of power, Kim listens anew to histories that have long since remained unheard.

The work is not a simple reconstruction of the past. Kim unearths poems that were once transmitted and circulated through traditions of oral recitation. More than simply reading aloud, recitation was a mode of learning embodied through breath and auditory rhythm, and a primary method by which scholars memorized classical texts and literature. Over the centuries, this tradition gradually declined under the combined effects of colonial rule and modernization, leaving few traces of its original vocal practice. Through archival research, philological investigation, and consultation with specialists, Kim assembles the historical evidence needed to infer the vocal qualities of this lost recitation tradition. Each poem is then entrusted to a composer rooted in the poem's linguistic and cultural contexts, who has themselves experienced migration, enabling it to be voiced anew through contemporary sound.

Nine poems, each interpreted by one of nine composers, are presented as immersive sound through a 115.4-channel loudspeaker system. Within this expansive sonic environment, visitors encounter the work by listening with their entire bodies, forming an affective resonance with the poems' speakers. Because complete restoration of the original voices is impossible, the sounds that flow throughout the exhibition become something entirely new—a contemporary sonic landscape of Asia. In this way, the work invites us to imagine the future possibilities that the act of listening may yet open.

Alongside the new commission, the exhibition presents a research archive documenting the project's development, together with four earlier works by the artist.

YoungEun Kim (b. 1980) lives and works in Santa Cruz and Seoul. Her practice examines how sound has been constituted and technologically developed within specific social, political, and historical contexts. Central to her work is the development of listening as a critical and embodied mode of practice. For Kim, sound is not an object of aesthetic contemplation but a medium through which forgotten histories and lived experiences can be revisited through listening, beyond the visual frameworks that have long structured human history.

Kim is the recipient of the 2025 Korea Artist Prize (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea); the 2026 ACC Future Prize (National Asian Culture Center, Korea); the 2020 City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship (United States); the 2017 Grand Prize (SONGEUN Art Award, Korea); a 2017 Honorary Mention (Prix Ars Electronica, Austria); and the 2014–2015 Mondriaan Fund Fellowship (Netherlands). Her work is in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan; the Seoul Museum of Art; and the Sigg Collection, Switzerland.