Bio

Artist's Statement

HWANYUN examines the conditions under which sound registers a body. The work is built from sensors, conductive surfaces, and generative sound systems whose state is altered by a viewer's distance, touch, and voice. There is no finished form: only a circuit that closes when someone enters it, and the sound and light that circuit produces.

The work begins in composition. Studying music in London, HWANYUN was drawn to the particular sounds of that city, and the unfamiliar way music was approached at Goldsmiths turned that listening around. What held was sound itself: experimental sound, soundscapes, the act of hearing as such. The idea of sound as a line laid over time slowly tilted toward space.

The site of sensing is made by hand. In Three Pieces: Untitled I, polycarbonate on the wall turns the sound of the room into light, and copper on the table returns the touch of a hand as sound. The copper structures of Conductive Circles close a circuit the moment skin meets metal, switching on the projected rings. Intuition: Untitled I paints electric paint onto hanji so that the surface itself becomes the sensor, releasing wind and water recorded in Iceland according to the distance of a fingertip. In place of ready-made interfaces, materials that can be touched, copper, paper, conductive paint, become the plane on which contact turns into signal.

Sound is written as rules rather than as a piece. Atypical Circuit runs on seven loops of 99, 162, 88, 120, 68, 125, and 16 beats; none divides into another, and the same arrangement never returned during the run of the exhibition. Mujae (無諸) is tuned to D just intonation at 60 BPM, so that one beat equals one second and the work breathes in clock time rather than musical time. In RFC: D — Tuning as Protocol, six sine voices listen to the beating between them and negotiate pitch until the beating reaches zero and they lock. Sound is not played back. A system rests in an accidental stability, and what the viewer changes is precisely that stability.

Noise and dissolution, then, are not failures. When the image shatters into glitch and the sound tears in Atypical Circuit, that is the record of the system having sensed a body; with no one present, nothing distorts. The mandala of Mujae is woven from the flyers and signboards that appear and vanish on the street. It completes only when three people gather, and when everyone stays before the finished form for fifteen seconds together, it collapses. Generation and dissolution are not opposites but one cycle, and the work gives the viewer not a seat outside that cycle but the hand that draws the circle.

Being together is a process of tuning. In Coexistence, a visually impaired musician's live performance related to the installation in real time, showing how an unseen sense can shape a space. We've Opened turned a street-facing showcase at a Berlin residency into a table where strangers sat down together. Reading the stripes of a garment as points, lines, and intervals, or the pattern of moss as a record of weather and growth, the work returns things too familiar to notice to the material of another sense. Sound does not stop at what is heard; it spreads into light, vibration, and the changing of a surface, and in that shift a familiar space briefly holds the conditions of an unfamiliar perception.

HWANYUN