Installation view of 《To Future Listeners: Migrating Sound》 © ACC
The National Asian Culture Center presents
the ACC Future Prize 2026: YoungEun Kim, 《To Future Listeners: Migrating Sound》, on view through February 14, 2027.
ACC Future Prize is the National Asian
Culture Center’s award program for interdisciplinary artistic practices.
Through a competitive selection process, it recognizes promising artists in the
field and supports the production and exhibition of new work.
YoungEun Kim’s practice explores narratives
marginalized by the history of ocularcentrism through sound and listening,
situating them within broader social and historical contexts. Centering aural
experience, her work investigates both sound and listening as modes of artistic
and critical practice.
Her recent projects examine distinctive modes
of listening shaped by histories of migration, using a wide range of aural
events—from language and music to the sounds of everyday life—as the point of
departure.
YoungEun Kim, To Future Listeners: Migrating Sound, 2026, 115.4 channel sound, 3-channel video, lighting, 60min. Commissioned by ACC. © ACC
《To Future Listeners:
Migrating Sounds》 is an exhibition that explores the
histories of movement and migration in Asia through sound, inviting visitors to
experience them with the full range of their senses.
Employing Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) and an
immersive spatial audio system, the exhibition creates a multilayered
soundscape in which diverse voices move, overlap, and resonate throughout the
space.
These voices originate in poems from the past
that give expression to the experiences and emotions of movement and migration
shaped by Asia’s complex histories, including colonial violence and war.
YoungEun Kim, To Future Listeners: Migrating Sound, 2026, 115.4 channel sound, 3-channel video, lighting, 60min. Commissioned by ACC. © ACC
The exhibition begins with the artist’s
questions: How do the experiences and emotions of the modern migration resonate
with poems of the past? How might the sounds of the past give rise to a new
sonic realism in the present?
Weaving together histories of movement and
migration through sound, the exhibition imagines a new sonic landscape of Asia.
At the same time, it repositions the act of listening as a mode of critical
inquiry, inviting audiences to imagine the future possibilities that acts of
listening may yet open.
