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Performance Info

Kwon Byung-jun has produced music for various disciplines, including film soundtracks, fashion shows, dance, theater, and classical Korean music, and is currently active as a media artist and hardware engineer working on projects based on sound. Recently, he held a sound exhibit that utilized local position system headphones, which he developed, and he is currently working on a performance project involving robots. His major works include This Is Me, Forest of Subtle Truth 2, and Sobbing Bells.

Q. The direction of your work changed in a major way while you were studying overseas in the Netherlands. Could you tell us about how you produce your work and your turning point as an artist?

A. I was producing music as an underground rock musician until my mid-30s while I was also producing music for dance, films, and theater. While I was in charge of producing music for the designer Jung Kuho’s show in 1998, I had a chance to learn about New York minimalism, and interacting with various artists developed a desire in me to want to know more about what was outside of mainstream music. Another influence came from my collaboration with gayageum musician Koh Jiyeon. I was working on a twenty-minute audio documentary that started with an interview with Shin Myeong-suk, Kang Tae-hong’s last student, and then presented gayageum works. From that experience I learned that the inevitable circumstances that led to the fall of classical Korean music began with staff notation, and I began questioning what it meant to properly hand down a tradition. I was shocked to learn what the traditional method for passing down the gayageum tradition ¬was, which was for the student to be in an empty space without a gayageum. The student would first listen to the teacher play a note and then perform the note by sounding it out with his or her voice. You had to listen first with your ears, and only when you could perfectly reproduce what you had heard could you use your instrument. I began to get curious about music, sound, classical Korean music, and traditions that had been severed during the Japanese colonial period. I thought then that I wished there was more material to help one to express oneself more fully, more than what mainstream music allowed us to, and that is why I went to study abroad in 2005. I studied sonology at the Royal Academy of Arts and in The Hague in the Netherlands, and then to broaden my horizons, I studied art and science and began to delve more deeply in studying technology. After I finished graduate school I worked for three years at STEIM, an organization for electronic instrument research and development, as a hardware engineer. I returned to Korea in 2011. It was not an easy decision but one big reason for returning was that I didn’t want to live as a foreigner in a foreign country anymore. I wanted to become a local artist, and I also thought it was time for me to work on projects for myself. Once I was back in Korea, I worked at the LIG theater with sound, video, and performances that told a story. I was also involved with the opening of the Asia Cultural Center, where I made and operated an Interaction Sound Lab. I think the type of work I do today began with the production of Revolution Is Not Broadcast on TV: Sound Effect Seoul 2017 at Arco Art Center in 2017. That was when I first developed LPS (local positioning system) headphones that responded according to your location. And I continue for the most part to produce works today in an exhibition format having to do with sound. In 2018, outside the Seoul Museum of Art, I dealt with the issue of Yemen migrants on Jeju Island using these headphones.

There has been a change in direction of my work recently. Going beyond sound and instruments, I started to make objects, and what I hope to show this winter is a robot. I’m currently working on making twelve robots. I’m going to choreograph robots that panhandle. I would like to produce a dance with the robots and do a play as well. Right now I’m laying the foundation for future productions. At the same time, I’m developing the headphone project further. Headphones are for individual use. They cut off the outside world and allow one to be alone. I focused on internal aspects of an individual while working on the previous headphones, but this time I would like to make headphones that facilitate meeting other people, make people physically closer, and get people to greet one another. I want to mix sounds of people on the street depending where they are and have them interact. It’ll be possible to have two people come together, then three. If one person is listening to a sound and then approaches another person, the sounds get mixed, and then if they shake hands or greet one another, they’re able to exchange the sounds. It’s a project I thought of when the “me too” movement and other issues came about and I thought we were getting too disconnected from one another.

Q. Although the main language for your work is technology, your projects don’t seem to show that on the outside. What is your opinion on the relationship between art and technology and how technology is dealt with when creating art?

A. We live in a society where you can’t tell a story without technology. I don’t think there was ever a time when technology was developing as fast as it is now. Technology is an extremely important element in reflecting the times, which affects everything ranging from politics, the economy, society, and culture. Of course, there are downsides as well as harmful effects of technology, such

as people becoming more isolated. In order to critique technology, we need individual perspectives. I also believe that in order to

prevent us from becoming slaves to technology, we have to know technology. If you produce work where all you see is technology then you might be relying on the comfort of technology. Developing an artistically discerning eye and making technology your own will take a long time, I think. When we come across new technology, it can become an opportunity for new possibilities.

When people come to see my work, they have certain expectations, as if they’re coming to see Steve Jobs make an announcement, like what new technology will he show us? I’m not saying I live up to the expectations, but there is a certain technology that conforms to my project concept, and if no one has used that technology properly, it is used more intentionally in my projects. It’s important for a project to draw wonderment and have elements of fun and play, but I think what’s more central is that it has novelty. It’s important that the technology gets people to step out from what they’re familiar with, for them to feel a sense of strangeness. I’ve used technology in my work for thirteen years, so I feel like the past and technology have become a part of me. It’s a language that comes out naturally to illustrate who I am as well as it being a tool. It has become assimilated within me.

Q. You have worked on projects with an interest in sound for a long time; I’m curious if there is a certain kind of sound you seek.

A. In my workshops I talk about three processes—jamyeong (reverberation), gongmyeong (resonance), and gonggam (empathy). Jamyeong is when a sound vibrates on its own, gongmyeong refers to resonance, and gonggam is the sharing of emotions. I think each process is important. Jamyeong refers to the reverberation of sound on its own, but many artists are not able to achieve that. For example, I started making mainstream music by copying other people. I wrote my own music, but it was not easy to create jamyeong using Western instruments following a Western lexicon within mainstream music. I think ’jamyeong’ means to find your own sound. If you look at Western music, which has a clear hierarchy—conductor, composer, and performers—you can see that Eastern music doesn’t fit that hierarchy. Generally, whoever performs the music the best becomes the composer. If you look at the gayageum sanjo, one piece of music is performed throughout a lifetime. It’s not working through multiple pieces. It’s not like learning how to write words on paper; it’s music in which the performer knows herself the best and can perform wholly by herself. That’s the tradition of jamyeong. From the perspective of using technology, jamyeong is like an alarm clock and a symbol of today’s automated modern technology.

Gongmyeong is a very important natural phenomenon when it comes to sound. You can’t leave out resonance when talking about the fundamentals of instruments. To explain simply, if you strike a tuning fork on a certain type of mass and then put the fork close to another object made of the same mass, the fork will start to reverberate, and that is resonance. An object has a natural frequency, and when it resonates a sound, you make it resonate louder. It’s simple physics, but when you understand resonance then you start to think about space, and when you start to work with resonance then you start to think about relationships and understand how they form. Then it’s quite mysterious to have something that you can’t see go through a change via air pressure and give a certain sound. It’s from that point that the imagination takes hold in different directions and becomes the starting point. Through that process empathy is shared by people. Ultimately, through art, there’s reverberation, resonance, which leads to empathy, then feeling. Therefore, this is an important process. In the end the sound I seek is inside jamyeong, gongmyeong, and gonggam.

Q. You’ve just told us about jamyeong, gongmyeong, and gonggam, and you’ve worked with someone who makes traditional bells. Tell us about that project.

A. It was a cashless project in 2015. It was a project that matched a Korean tradition with a modern artist, and the subject that year was gold. The modern artists worked at the iron museum and bell museum and exhibited through research and workshops. I worked with Human Cultural Asset, Master Artisan of Bronze Casting Holder Won Gwang-sik Ju Cheol-jang. He has made 7,000 bells in his lifetime and has made the world’s most prized bells. He doesn’t try to create the bells in the same manner as his past bells; rather he tries to outdo them. He has said, “I will be making bells in a thousand years.” What artist creates works today looking ahead thousand of years from now? Even the most grandiose projects in a thousand years would be in vain for most people. I did a project with bell beating frequencies—the low-toned ringing sound that results after you hit a bell. Bell frequency is determined by the thickness of the bell. Currently, in order to subtly control the frequency, small cuts are made in the back of the bell. In the West, the differences aren’t recognized; it sounds like the bell creates fixed sounds. In the East, we say that the bell’s beating frequency carries the words of the Buddha. In 1998, I did a project called “Two Analogue Metronomes and One Digital Delay.” Two metronomes would beat at the same set speed and at some point would get out of sync, and based on the delay, I created a complex and colorful rhythm. Later, I realized that was similar to the bell’s beating frequency.

Q. The media performance This Is Me drew other people’s faces onto your own and it reminded me of how a shaman used his or her body to perform gut (exorcism). Could you tell us about that project?

A. It was produced by the Nam June Paik Art Center. First I wanted to tell a story about the individual and the family. I thought about placing the faces of my ancestors onto my face, and while I was contemplating the different images the Chinese art of face-changing came to mind. I used the faces of famous political figures, such as Kim Ku, and the faces of cultural figures, such as John Cage, Paik Nam June, and even Park Geun-hye. It’s not to say that I’ve been influenced by Park Geun-hye, but I thought that everyone must have a little bit of her image. As I changed into various faces, similar to the Chinese art of face-changing, the Eastern message of reincarnation took hold in the technology, which also drew the audience in. As you mentioned there was an element of a spirit awakening via a shaman. And as the faces changed, you might have seen it as a medium, and I ended it with the image of the Buddha, which is reminiscent of Nam June Paik’s work. As the title states, that images were of me, but I think, aren’t they also of everyone? When I performed this project in Edinburgh, the response was very positive. Technically, it used an infrared camera that worked with an infrared light, which tracked the face and then projected the mapped face. No one had done this before, and in actuality, it’s very hard on the eyes. And because you have to simultaneously control the sound and video by yourself, it’s not an easy project to pull off.

Q. In your headphone project Forest of Subtle Truth, you stated that you would deliver site-specific sounds to the audience, but the audience heard sounds that were unrelated to the site. Could you tell us about how sound and space interact?

A. At first, the reason for making the local position system headphones was because in the group exhibition that dealt with sound that I was part of, we were all in one space. I was concerned about how to deliver my sound in that kind of environment. The local position system headphones responded when they were within ten centimeters of the set location. Forest of Subtle Truth was a group exhibition, so the space had a lot of objects and I thought about my project’s connection to them. You could see other people’s work without the headphones, but with the headphones and sound, you would see the work completely differently. After that, in Forest of Subtle Truth 2 at the Seoul Museum of Art, I used the square in front of the museum. There were special chairs made out of rocks, and you could sit in one and listen to the songs of refugees. Each chair was for one person, so you could sit and listen by yourself. If you walked further inside the square away from the chairs, you could hear the sounds of thunder; I had recorded the thunder sounds, which were like noises of war, in Seoul. The refugees had fled a war and I wanted to recreate the dire circumstances they might have endured. Behind the chairs at a bench were stories of people who had helped the refugees, and sounds of waves, airplanes, and even the bees of Halla Mountain. The thunder and bee sounds were metaphors for tragic fates inherent in our daily lives. Other sounds were everyday sounds of Korea that were arranged in a way that could be interpreted differently while alongside the stories of the refugees.

Q. Tell us more about how you’re expanding on the headphone projects.

A. I think ultimately it’s a story about the internal and external. In Forest of Subtle Truth 2, we took the exhibition outside; for the next project, we’ll move farther outside where we can have more relationships develop. At first we brought people outside of the

museum because it was too busy inside. There was a desire to escape the busyness, but I also wanted to create a space where people could meditate alone. I wanted to give them time to rest by themselves listening to the songs of the refugees and stare at

the far-away sky. In the future, I’d like to do a project at Han River Park. I would also like to try to combine GPS and LPS and use the technology in a bigger area, such as on Jeju Island, where people can climb the volcanic cones Oreum and think. The headphones I’m developing now get people to meet one another. As I mentioned earlier, I want the headphones to have an element of fun and get

people to greet one another. You’d have to bow your head for three seconds before you could exchange any sounds. It’s an aspect that encourages people to live with etiquette, and it would be great if people could enjoy themselves playing a game with rules I made.

Q. You are continuing to work on projects dealing with refugees. Could you tell us why and how you wanted to tell their stories?

A. When I was studying and working in the Netherlands, I felt like a refugee and a foreign migrant worker. I wanted to return to Korea partly because of that. I met Krzysztof Wodicsko, a media artist and activist, a little while back, and through him I thought more deeply about refugees. But more than that I became interested in refugees because of the response from right-wing Korean extremists on the Internet. When I saw that even so-called progressives display conservative attitudes when it comes to the issue of refugees, I thought it was showing a different aspect of Korean society, and I wanted to tell the stories of the refugees. I recorded Yemen refugees singing, and I didn’t realize until then that they are all excellent singers. Even in the Arab world, Yemen people are known for their musicality, and their songs are regarded as very special. It has a similar feel to Korean pansori. I recorded them using binaural recording to capture their presence and concentration. The starting point for the refugee story is that basically we are all foreigners. We don’t really know that we are foreigners. But for the people living in a big city like Seoul, they no longer have a hometown. Everything is changing and there is no place to return to. Refugees in Korean society is the second most important issue we have to deal with after the issue of Saewolho Ferry tragedy. Following Forest of Subtle Truth 2, I’ve been working on a project with robots that again deals with the refugee story. The robots imitate us, and if we get close to one, it will extend its hand. I’m curious as to how people will interpret this strange scenario.

Photograph Copyright :

1. (Main Image) Forest of Subtle Truth 2, 2018 Sound installation, local position system headphones-location 8, various sizes ©Kang Bong-hyung

2. Sobbing Bells, 2015 Sound installation (Sound: 24 minutes and 15 seconds), 24 vibration speakers, 12 bells and unpan (iron plate found in temples), amp, various sizes, Jincheon Bell Museum, Jincheon ©Nah Seung-yul

3. This Is Me, 2013 Media performance, 25 minutes and 30 seconds, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh International Festival, UK

Screen capture of archived video footage copyrighted

4. Forest of Subtle Truth 2, 2018 Sound installation, local position system headphones-location 8, various sizes Photo provided by Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2018

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E-mailbyungjun@gmail.com

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