YoungEun Kim
PROJECT
YoungEun Kim is interested in how sound and listening have been shaped by social and historical conditions. In this speculative reconstruction of the arrival of the first piano to the city of Daegu, Kim interrogates the idea of a fixed musical standard, exploring how the introduction of pitch A by American missionaries to Korea in the early twentieth century disrupted traditional Korean music. The video includes text from records of international meetings on standard pitch held in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These words recount the history of how pitch A came to be set at a frequency of 440 Hz and was continually set upwards over time, revealing the creators and changing nature of this standard.
ABOUT
YoungEun Kim’s works explore how aural perceptions are constructed within specifical historical contexts and how they relate to decolonisation. Her work has been presented at the Gwangju Biennale (South Korea); M+ (Hong Kong); Museum of Fine Arts Bern (Switzerland); Samsung Museum of Art (South Korea); and Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (US), among many others. She is the recipient of the 2026 ACC Future Prize and has won the Korea Artist Prize, the SongEun Art Award, the Jecheon International Music and Film Festival Award, and received Honorary Mentions at the Prix Ars Electronica. She was an artist in residence at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam and is currently completing a PhD in film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.