Installation view of 《EarTrain_Reverse》 (RASA, 2021) ©Seo Minwoo

Including myself, many people visit museums. While our individual purposes for going to museums may differ, the actions we take there are largely the same. We go to museums to look at things with our eyes—objects placed there, or events unfolding within the space. A museum is a place for seeing. Undoubtedly so.

Yet there is a problem. The act of “seeing” is far more complex than it appears. For instance, visual culture theorist W. J. T. Mitchell once aptly stated, “There are no visual media.” We appreciate architecture with our eyes, but we also wander through it and sense it with our entire bodies. We think we see sculpture with our eyes, yet at the same time we experience a sense of tactility, as if touching it with our hands. Whenever we look at something in a museum, senses other than vision continually intervene.

Adding to this, sound art scholar Douglas Kahn has pointed out, in his analysis of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, that many of its key artists were deeply trained in music. In other words, at the very outset of the history of “contemporary art,” music was already present. Such discussions prompt us to reconsider the many hidden senses embedded within the museum. A museum, then, is not merely a space for seeing. It is a battleground of senses, where heterogeneous sensations can erupt at any moment. Yet this fact is often forgotten.

In 2021, Seo Minwoo held a solo exhibition titled 《EarTrain_Reverse》. Inside the gallery stood sculptures of simple form. Rectangular modules stacked atop one another evoked the legacy of Minimalist sculpture. However, it is unlikely that visitors readily associated Seo’s works with the Minimalist tradition—because sound was emanating from the sculptures.

Seo Minwoo, Eartrain 50-00, 50-08, 08-00, 2021, Mixed media, 275x310x330 mm, 365x310x330 mm, 365x310x770 mm ©Seo Minwoo

Seo Minwoo produces what might be called “sound sculptures.” He fabricates speakers of simple form and cloaks them in shells that resemble sculptural objects, placing them in the exhibition space. What he creates is neither sculpture nor speaker alone—or perhaps both at once. These “sound sculptures,” as expected, produce sound: periodic clattering noises, resonant humming, muffled tones that seem to envelop the ears entirely. They are the sounds of a train passing through a tunnel.

For the exhibition, the artist imagined a fictional train and recreated its sounds using Foley techniques—that is, pre-recorded sound effects. To truly listen to these fake-yet-real train sounds, viewers had to momentarily close their eyes and concentrate. It was a moment in which hearing took precedence over sight.

Seo Minwoo, Travelogue E&C, 2021, Mixed media, 300x300x410mm, 1’14 ©Seo Minwoo

Closing one’s eyes to listen to a sculpture: this constitutes a rupture in the museum order so firmly established as a space of vision. Sound compels us to re-sense sculpture—and the museum itself—drawing out forgotten, alien sensations concealed within. It turns the space into a battleground once again, unsettling the positions of things that had quietly remained in place.

Philosopher Giorgio Agamben defines the contemporary as follows: the contemporary is not merely someone who lives in the same era. Rather, it is one who does not coincide with their time, who does not comply with its demands, who perceives not its bright lights but its darkness. Let us rephrase this slightly. Contemporary art is that which refuses to conform to the senses hardened under the name of art, and instead searches for the darkness cast somewhere within them.

Seo Minwoo oscillates between sound and sculpture, entering the tunnel in search of a darkness that suits him. We wait to hear the sound of the darkness he will find.

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