Music Album 《Slough and Trajectory: Spiral Horizontally World》 ©Seo Minwoo

Seo Minwoo’s solo exhibition 《Slough and Trajectory》 is held at Arcade Seoul from November 8 to December 3. This exhibition constitutes the final chapter of a long-term project unfolding across May (album), August (performance), and November (exhibition). Through this extended trajectory, Seo presents experimental works that approach sound as a material event and reconfigure the conditions of listening.

Held at Arcade Seoul, 《Slough and Trajectory》 consolidates Seo’s investigations into sound not as a purely auditory experience, but as a material phenomenon that traverses time, space, and the body. Over the course of a year, the project progressively expanded the conditions of listening through interconnected formats—album, performance, and exhibition.

In the album 《Slough and Trajectory: Spiral Horizontally World》 released in May, Seo fragmented and recomposed everyday field recordings, exploring compositional arrangements that depart from conventional musical grammar. Sound is not treated as an emotional medium or narrative device, but regarded as material fragments in themselves.

Performance view of 《Sough and Trajectory: Trajectories》 ©Arcade Seoul

In the August performance 《Slough and Trajectory: Trajectories》, latex laid across the ground functioned as a surface of listening that recorded the audience’s movements. Footprints, wrinkles, and shifts in body weight remained as physical residues of the act of listening, extending auditory experience into an event where sensation, body, and space intertwine.

This exhibition is decisive in that it transfers the latex used in the performance directly into the exhibition space. No new sound is played. Instead, traces of already-occurred sounds—footprints, creases, residual pressure—are rearranged to reconstruct a post-sonic world as a visual and spatial structure. The latex is no longer a mere material but an unrecorded record: a remaining shell of listening.

By placing these remnants in the exhibition space in an ad-hoc manner, the artist generates what he describes as “horizontal vibration,” dismantling hierarchies between senses. Vision does not dominate hearing, nor does the body supersede materiality. Instead, all senses traverse the same surface, vibrating in parallel.

Installation view of 《Sough and Trajectory》 (Arcade Seoul, 2025) ©Arcade Seoul 

Seo Minwoo describes himself as “someone who makes fake music,” yet his work extends beyond music toward a reconfiguration of sculptural perception. In the exhibition space, visitors no longer listen solely with their ears; instead, they walk across and observe a terrain composed of sonic residues, relearning the order of perception.

Curator Yoon Yeoyoul, who organized the project, notes that “the exhibition does not present a completed structure but resembles the instability inherent in listening itself.” Indeed, the exhibition functions as a mutable sensory field, continuously altered by the placement of speakers, the folds of latex, the direction of natural light, and the movement of visitors.

Through this exhibition, Arcade Seoul proposes a distinctive sensory landscape in which sculpture, sound, and bodily perception intersect, presenting an experimental attempt to construct a new sculptural order from the remnants of sound.

《Slough and Trajectory》 demonstrates how contemporary sound art can move beyond sound itself to reconstruct sensory events. As residues of sound once again become perceptual structures, visitors encounter expanded possibilities of listening.

References