ON KIM

With this solo exhibition at Gallery Chosun, On KIM explores the (im)possibility of communication through characters that are not vocalized. The exhibition title PhonicAphonic is a term combining “phonic,” an adjective indicating a relationship with sound or voices, and “aphonic,” meaning something unrelated to sound or voices. The exhibition includes works of art created through the careful arrangement of documents, sounds, poems, and more, along with Korean characters in unreadable shapes that only appear before us in moments of error.

Our tradition of phonocentrism treats the spoken word as something truer than the written one, with writing regarded as something that is always readable. Like an outsider existing on the periphery of this tradition, the artist combines written characters that have lost their voice to create senses that we hear with the eyes, or see with the ears.

Artist’s Notes

Artistically, PhonicAphonic establishes a function occupée of language. Characters that exist in the bibliographic lineage but remain unreadable, characters that have not been assigned roles or functions, characters that are impossible to record or utter appear to us as errors before quickly vanishing like phantoms or mirages. Through text and through reading out loud, characters whose linguistic body and meaning has been taken away are made to participate in auditory circulation, in non-material and non-intentional phonetic enlargement, and in planned phonetic distribution