Bespoke Wallpaper Music
2014
Sound performance series
Percussionists, singers, metronome, walkie-talkies, ladders
This sound performance was realized at the Solomon Building, located in the middle of the vast second-hand market called Hwanghak-dong Market, Hwanghak-dong, Seoul. This market is also nicknamed “The Last Market,” as everything that has been used up flows past here before it is discarded. The fan-shaped Solomon Building sits in one of the many market alleys. Upon entering, one can experience an unexpected visual block, in contrast to its eye-catching surroundings. Actively exploring the interior of this building, one will find small, invisible rooms that are hidden and overlapped behind its walls. In the market’s heyday, these rooms were used for tiny stores. As of today, they are quietly hiding on top of each other. The discovery of these rooms reinvigorated my perception of the whole building, and motivated me to reimagine its less-noticed features such as an elevator moving behind closed doors or a fanning veranda alongside a curved wall.
The first floor has a myriad of small, pie-slice rooms connected side by side into a fan shape, all hidden behind a curved wall; a small elevator constantly moves between the first and sixth floors, heard from behind a door and a wall; and the sixth floor has five more rooms surrounding a large central space. Such spaces where visibility is interrupted become re-identified as aural spaces and can thus be sensed in entirely different ways. I have experienced that, through my previous works, such as Room 401, sound can delineate the essential physicality and the sense of place of a visually featureless or entirely invisible space—what I like to think of as an aural space. I conceived a sound performance involving voices and walls based on the Solomon Building’s potential as a powerful aural space.
During the performance, performers hide themselves in spaces from where they cannot see or touch one another, and continue their performances according to other performers’ faint sounds and the conductor’s remote signals. The audience, too, is placed in a situation in which they cannot view the performers, and only through sound can they trace the performers’ positions or imagine and interpret the spaces they inhabit.
(KR)
2014
Sound performance series
Percussionists, singers, metronome, walkie-talkies, ladders
This sound performance was realized at the Solomon Building, located in the middle of the vast second-hand market called Hwanghak-dong Market, Hwanghak-dong, Seoul. This market is also nicknamed “The Last Market,” as everything that has been used up flows past here before it is discarded. The fan-shaped Solomon Building sits in one of the many market alleys. Upon entering, one can experience an unexpected visual block, in contrast to its eye-catching surroundings. Actively exploring the interior of this building, one will find small, invisible rooms that are hidden and overlapped behind its walls. In the market’s heyday, these rooms were used for tiny stores. As of today, they are quietly hiding on top of each other. The discovery of these rooms reinvigorated my perception of the whole building, and motivated me to reimagine its less-noticed features such as an elevator moving behind closed doors or a fanning veranda alongside a curved wall.
The first floor has a myriad of small, pie-slice rooms connected side by side into a fan shape, all hidden behind a curved wall; a small elevator constantly moves between the first and sixth floors, heard from behind a door and a wall; and the sixth floor has five more rooms surrounding a large central space. Such spaces where visibility is interrupted become re-identified as aural spaces and can thus be sensed in entirely different ways. I have experienced that, through my previous works, such as Room 401, sound can delineate the essential physicality and the sense of place of a visually featureless or entirely invisible space—what I like to think of as an aural space. I conceived a sound performance involving voices and walls based on the Solomon Building’s potential as a powerful aural space.
During the performance, performers hide themselves in spaces from where they cannot see or touch one another, and continue their performances according to other performers’ faint sounds and the conductor’s remote signals. The audience, too, is placed in a situation in which they cannot view the performers, and only through sound can they trace the performers’ positions or imagine and interpret the spaces they inhabit.
(KR)
#1-3 Performance View at Cake Gallery, Seoul (Video Still by Mee Jee Lee)
#4 Audience listening to the performance (Photo by Jong Hyun Seo)
#5-7 The first pages of the scores for each piece
5 min Video Documentaion