{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/youngeun-kim-slippery-sounds-feature-mark-rappolt/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":127627,"slug":"youngeun-kim-slippery-sounds-feature-mark-rappolt","title":"YoungEun Kim: Slippery Sounds","excerpt":"The artist’s work investigates how recorded (and not recorded) sounds can tell us both about the past and how the past is being constantly reshaped in the present","content":"\n

The artist’s work investigates how recorded (and not recorded) sounds can tell us both about the past and how the past is being constantly reshaped in the present

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At first glance you’d think YoungEun Kim’s 12-minute video To Future Listeners III (2025) is aimed at an audience of devoted audio geeks. The video shows an open window to what looks (to that geek) to be Steinberg’s Cubase audio-editing software as a user manipulates a sound file. It’s a screen presented on a screen. A cursor dances around it, clicking, dragging, manipulating, as a female voice explains, in Korean, what it is doing and why it is doing it. As if to convince the viewer that behind the software there’s a human presence. Because we have to do that these days: prove we’re human. In many respects, however, the visual experience on offer is like that of watching a YouTube tutorial. It’s an aesthetic that the Korean, based in Seoul and Santa Cruz, California, has favoured in a number of her video works across a two-decade career that has culminated in her receiving both the Korea Artist Prize in 2025 and the 2026 ACC Future Prize.

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Perhaps one of the reasons the software takes centre stage in To Future Listeners III is because it gives the immaterial sound a shape – waves – so that we can watch as well as listen to the audio file. In an earlier videowork, Ear Training (2022), in which the ‘action’ takes place across a digitised version of lined notebook paper, it’s humans who give sound a shape. The narrative here (constructed from radio archives, academic papers and soldiers’ testimonies) concerns how ear training (used to help musicians identify the particular pitch of a given sound) was repurposed to train Japanese soldiers and sailors to identify particular airplane and submarine sounds during the Sino-Japanese and Second World Wars. Culture repurposed for combat. We’re told via voiceover that with the appropriate training such combatants could recognise these sounds from more than twice the distance than those who were untrained. We see recreations of the exhaustive military sound tests soldiers had to undertake. We hear the sound of an engine and then witness that sound, of a Boeing Flying Fortress bomber, written in musical notation across the page. Musical overlaps with mechanics. As the training was shortened, as Japan’s situation grew more desperate, the sonic descriptions become verbal, and appear in the video as if bureaucratically typed on the page: ‘SUBMARINE: Middle-tone; 300-350 Hz; triplets; Regular spinning sound: “clatter-clatter”; The slowest eight-note triplet=90’. But they all translate to a make and a model, and an altitude or a distance. Emblematic perhaps of Kim’s later interest in the effects and consequences of mixing human sounds with nonhuman technologies.

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As for the audio file being edited in To Future Listeners III, it’s a recording of a solo male voice, sometimes hard to understand, singing a song about migration – perhaps a version of The Shores of Amerikay – which, the voiceover tells us, is sung by a Mr Keillor, an Irish migrant to America. She goes on to inform us that this recording is a digitised version of a recording made during the early twentieth century, retrieved from a wax cylinder. The lyrics to the song, inasmuch as they are decipherable, are about leaving the certainties of the place of your birth for the uncertainties of a new land. But it’s not the words that interest the narrator. It’s the voice.

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To Future Listeners III (stills), 2025, single-channel video, HD, colour, sound (stereo), 12 min 25 sec. © and courtesy the artist
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In the mid-nineteenth century, the narrator claims – all the while, her cursor fidgets with the peaks and troughs of the soundwaves on screen – women migrants from Ireland far outnumbered their male counterparts. All that fidgeting, she declares, is about adjusting the tone and the timbre of Mr Keillor’s voice so that it sounds to be that of a woman. To better reflect the facts. To give voice to those voices that have been erased. Even though there’s around half a century between the facts she has just quoted and Mr Keillor’s recorded performance.

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And of course, buried beneath all this is the fact that sound is malleable – that what has been given form can be shaped and sculpted. Curiously, at this point the software presents the pitch and formant controls as digital dials with twistable knobs, as we might expect of analogue hardware – the software making itself intelligible just as its user, in her own way, tries to make the audio file more truthful. Everything is being translated: just as the Korean audio is rendered in English subtitles onscreen, the software mimics analogue hardware so that those less familiar with the language of digital technology might better interface with it and understand it.

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As we watch, the audio file is moved to an AI vocal-synthesis engine, to make it more ‘realistically’ feminine, the narrator declares, and allow for a cleanup of the by now almost totally unintelligible lyrics. Moreover, here the user deploys some of the multiple ai voices on offer to build the single track into a polyvocal chorus. Now the AI is helping to make what was once a human voice better fit the historical record. “Immigrant men,” the voiceover informs us “viewed as the founders of key ethnic institutions, were treated as more important sources” than their female counterparts when it came to who got to be recorded on wax cylinders. By now the chorus has extended to seven female voices.

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The whole process can’t help but remind us of the fact that all histories are, to varying extents, coaxed, shaped and moulded into being. Like works of art. That the past is invented, or at least tooled and retooled, to fit the needs of the present. That what we call ‘history’ is in fact and by definition anachronous. Historical records can be reshaped to propose certain ‘truths’, but to do so is also to conceal the ‘lie’ that was left to us from that time. Truth and untruth become slippery things.

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To Future Listeners I (stills), 2022, single-channel video, HD, colour, sound (stereo), 8 min 3 sec. © and courtesy the artist
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As the manipulations documented in To Future Listeners III proceed, we’re left wondering just how ‘authentic’ an experience created by AI might be. But there’s no time to worry about that too much. The voiceover moves on to a history of race in American society: how Irish people were originally favoured as domestic servants, partly, according to some scholars (although this is hotly disputed), on the grounds that it had taken some time for them to be culturally accepted as full members of the white establishment; later, as stigmas relaxed, they were replaced by Black people at the bottom of the household hierarchy. The icons in the AI interface suggest that the user is adding Black voices to their track. As her ‘history’ takes its final shape.

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The history of that work begins with To Future Listeners I (2022), an eight-minute recording of a sound file being processed in Adobe Audition. The audio is a digitised version of ‘the first recording of Korean traditional music’ produced by American anthropologist Alice Fletcher in 1896 and performed by Korean students who were then studying in Washington, DC. The voiceover this time informs us that wax-cylinder recordings are fragile and susceptible to changes in environmental conditions. (To Future Listeners II, 2022, comprises a wax cylinder recording of Kim singing Love Song: Ar-ra-rang 1, the song recorded by Fletcher in the earlier work, continuously played on a distinctly ancient-looking phonograph, so that its deterioration becomes part of the song.) Back in the earlier work, the user announces that she is going to deploy a noise-reduction plug-in to alleviate the damage done to the recording by its crumbling material prison. While she is doing that the narrator introduces us to the ethnomusicologist Erich von Hornbostel, a pioneer of that discipline at the turn of the twentieth century, and to his enthusiasm for recordings of non-Western music, part of the Austrian’s wider project of translating that music “into a form more intelligible to Western ears”. Not, the voiceover points out, because he thought that non-Western music was primitive (as did so many of his peers), but because he considered it representative of parallel living traditions. Living traditions that, as Fletcher also surmised, would be quickly wiped out by the spread of European modernity and thus needed this kind of ‘saving’. Ironically, just like the audio recorded for similar reasons (and posterity) by Fletcher in 1896 needs saving (by the noise-reduction plug-in) today. At least in our narrator’s account.

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To Future Listeners I (still), 2022, single-channel video, HD, colour, sound (stereo), 8 min 3 sec. © and courtesy the artist
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It’s telling in Kim’s work that form and meaning often dovetail in this way, the one slowly consuming the other, just as it also does (albeit in different ways) in the work of some of Kim’s contemporaries, such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan or Yuko Mohri, who work in a field in which sound and art cross over. Back in To Future Listeners I, the user keeps redeploying the noise-cancelling plug-in. And gradually the track disappears, as it determines that fragments of the vocals themselves are noise. Mirroring, according to the narrator, the premonition of destruction that caused people like Fletcher and von Hornbostel to record them in the first place. Telling us more about the worldview of the culture that produced those recordings than they do about the culture of those who sang them. If To Future Listeners III appears to leave us with something, its predecessor works to quite the opposite effect. Just as ‘true’ history, as rendered in Kim’s work, is the product of a neo-Marxist class struggle between those who have been heard and those who have not.

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YoungEun Kim’s To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds is on show at the Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, through 14 February

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From the Autumn 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.

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