KAY YOON

Kay Yoon works within the spectral realms among cultural memory, technological mediation, and embodied ritual, with her practice emerging from the emotional terrain of displacement and cultural crossing. Her work traces how the inherited structures of traditions and modernity persist and evolve across temporal and geographical boundaries through personal family narratives and systemic social forces—approaching tradition as spectral matter that haunts and animates contemporary life. Yoon linguifies the boundaries of urban alienation, fragmented identity, and untranslatable emotions, transforming these liminal conditions into “sonic thinking” that transcends personal experience to challenge social ideologies. By incorporating traditional ceremonial objects alongside industrial materials, she creates spaces where mechanical elements take on ritual significance, and traditional objects reveal unexpected resonances with modern living. At the intersection of traditional pansori[1] rhythms, mechanical noise, contemporary music’s dissonances, and everyday materials—dining tables, utensils, fabric—she excavates forms of ritual newly emerging as contemporary landscapes, developing linguistic experiments for “emotional migration” by translating untranslatable emotions into vibration, sound, and bodily performance.