(top) Kim Eunseol, The Shape of Voice, 2023, Mixed media, Dimensions variable / (bottom) Kim Eunseol, Passive Communication, 2023, 2-channel video, 4min 55sec. © ieum

In Kim Eunseol’s 《Intermediate Language》, there is a movement by the artist to search for relationships between languages. Here, language includes not only speaking and listening, but also pausing, walking, and looking—many actions surrounding the body. It is not a neatly ordered language confined to a mother tongue or governed by orthographic rules, but rather a “language” in which subtle tremors, contact and collision, fleeting noises, and many elements coexist and intersect.

In the exhibition space filled with these languages, a journey unfolds that follows the artist’s sensory experience of learning the sounds of the world at a time when she did not yet know what sound was.

The scope of language that Kim Eunseol engages with can first be perceived in the video work Dialogue of Vibrating Bodies. This 17-minute and 11-second video exceeds the expectations of visitors who come to the exhibition with the title “Intermediate Language.” It deviates from the predictable assumption that one would hear sounds, encounter text, and witness a clash between orality and textuality. The moment one sits on a chair placed in the exhibition space, the body begins to vibrate slightly. On the screen, rather than sound, images fill the field of vision. As far as the eye can reach, one sees the skin, forearms, and the muscles between the back and neck of two people.

In the leaflet, the artist writes, “When I did not know what sound was, I learned sound-language through tactile experiences—through the resonance of the neck and torso, and the breath of the mouth—by pressing my body against my parents’ bodies.” The artist’s journey, which begins from this experience and memory, intervenes in surrounding sounds, visual images, images of movement, and countless scenes and gaps of conversation.

The video work Dialogue of Vibrating Bodies comprehensively captures the volume, texture, and sound of the air between bodies in contact. The closely intertwined bodies of two performers produce slow-motion sequences, still images of the body (frames), and even a “guide for learning.”


Kim Eunseol, AI Language Learning with Auditory Impairment, 2022, Single-channel video, 5min. 30sec. © ieum

For Kim Eunseol, language appears to be a material that moves between two people, between two beings. In another room of the exhibition, the works The Shape of Voice and Passive Communication present the artist’s observations as she uses hearing aids and perceives sound and non-sound (things that are not sound) through visual, tactile, and other senses. Within the entropy of language that is produced and circulated today, the artist presents language that arrives slightly late, as well as distances that are too close or too far, through spatial works.

The video work Passive Communication and The Shape of Voice, which includes smartphones and ready-made facial models, are displayed facing each other across a glass window. In both works, voices of textualized conversation—mediated through smartphone screens, chat messages, and social network services—move back and forth in the form of Korean subtitles, ellipses, exclamation marks, question marks, and punctuation marks. As viewers observe these works that deal with the materiality of conversation, they are led to consider what it means to participate in, intervene in, and observe a conversation.

One of the most important aspects of 《Intermediate Language》(Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, 2023) is that the artist continuously sends signals—both receiving and transmitting—through sound as a form of dialogue and learning with the external world. The artist formulates questions and hypotheses, collects them, and materializes them through her own execution and collaboration with performers.

The video work AI Language Learning with Auditory Impairment, positioned directly in front of the entrance, raises questions about how artificial intelligence learns language. What new processes of learning language might emerge between humans and artificial intelligence through lip movements, language habits, and data?

Within this process, there are bound to be many errors and misunderstandings. Learning the order of language, acquiring its grammar and examples, shaping one’s mouth accordingly, and learning words is a continuous process of learning and failure that begins at birth. The work Soundless Sound, placed in one corner of the second-floor exhibition space, presents “visual sounds” that the artist has discovered in everyday life.

The term “visual sound” is not coined by the writer, but was written in the leaflet. Moving fish, patterns, light, and shadows all produce images of soundless sound. One comes to realize how vast and deep the artist’s understanding of language truly is.

Kim Eunseol’s 《Intermediate Language》(Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, 2023) provides sign language interpretation, Korean subtitles, and audio descriptions from the entrance to the exit of the exhibition space. The accessibility guidance itself becomes both the driving force of her work and the practical point of contact with the audience.

The artist’s solo exhibition embodies and demonstrates the kind of accessibility that contemporary art exhibitions must have today. From the time when she did not know what sound was to the present, when one might mistakenly believe they understand all sounds, this exhibition encompasses a world in which we move together, listen together, and share different sounds through writing and seeing.

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