YoungEun Kim's 'To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds' Opens at Asia Culture Center, Gwangju

Key facts

• YoungEun Kim's 'To Future Listeners: Migrating Sounds' is on show at the Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, through 14 February.
• 'To Future Listeners III' (2025) is a 12-minute single-channel video showing Steinberg's Cubase audio-editing software.
• The audio file is a digitized wax-cylinder recording of Mr Keillor, an Irish migrant to America, singing a song about migration, possibly 'The Shores of Amerikay'.
• The narrator states that in the mid-nineteenth century, women migrants from Ireland far outnumbered male counterparts.
• An AI vocal-synthesis engine is used to make the voice more 'realistically' feminine and to clean up unintelligible lyrics, building a chorus of seven female voices.
• 'To Future Listeners I' (2022) is an eight-minute video showing a sound file processed in Adobe Audition, featuring a digitized 1896 recording by Alice Fletcher of Korean traditional music performed by Korean students in Washington, DC.
• 'To Future Listeners II' (2022) comprises a wax cylinder recording of Kim singing 'Love Song: Ar-ra-rang 1' played continuously on a phonograph.
• Kim received the Korea Artist Prize in 2025 and the 2026 ACC Future Prize.