RESERVOIR OF SENSES

Kim Joon Reservoir of Senses

Baik Art is pleased to present Reservoir of Senses, a solo exhibition by Kim Joon, grounded in the artist’s extensive research into geography and ecology. This exhibition serves as an archive, encapsulating over a decade of collected sounds and images from various geological and ecological environments. By drawing from the natural world, Kim offers visitors a multisensory experience, encouraging contemplation amidst the overwhelming influx of images and information that defines our era. In this exhibition, Kim Joon revisits memories of places where he recorded sounds, carefully curating selections that resonate with his sensory experiences—ranging from scents and humidity to emotions like fear, surprise, and serenity.

Kim Joon’s practice is rooted in a deep fascination with sound, particularly its ability to reveal the unseen narratives of urban environments. Through sound, he invites us to perceive and reflect on the invisible structures that shape our social and natural worlds. His work transforms and documents phenomena within urban spaces and the natural landscape, using both physical and electronic means to convert these experiences into sound. The resulting data, presented in variable installations, is designed to transfer the artist’s sensory encounters and the sense of place to the audience, fostering subjective interpretation and imagination. This process, which the artist terms the “visualization of hearing,” involves collecting intangible auditory data and rendering it visible. At the same time, it refers to the multisensory experience that allows visitors to acoustically, tactilely, and visually engage with the sound’s resonance within the exhibition space.

Reservoir of Senses is composed of sounds and images drawn from three distinct regions: the Gangwon-do area in Korea, as well as locations in New Zealand and Australia. The exhibition presents the results of Kim’s historical and geographical research, undertaken during various artist residencies, capturing the essence of these places through sound. In the gallery space, sounds collected from the wind, water, and trees in Korea’s Gangwon-do mountains, the hardness of stones from New Zealand’s South Island, and the ambient noises of Australia’s Blue Mountains converge, each imbued with the artist’s personal experiences and emotions.

The exhibition includes sound benches, sound archive boxes, and pendulum structures, new works which explore the expansive nature of sound as a medium. These pieces, specifically tailored for Baik Art’s gallery space, invite more direct analogue interaction, allowing visitors to engage with the works by sitting, listening, opening drawers, and even rotating objects. The sound archive boxes and drawers, in particular, are designed to stimulate the audience’s synesthetic experience, encouraging an intimate connection with the sounds and items the artist treasures.

Through Reservoir of Senses, Kim Joon expands the immaterial medium of sound into a visual, tactile, and olfactory journey, guiding visitors beyond mere auditory perception into a realm of shared sensory experience. The artist hopes that visitors will connect with the intuitive reflections evoked by the sounds and images, rather than focusing solely on the specifics of the places or objects archived. In an ever-changing world where cities and nature, earth and life, continually transform, the sounds of time and place resonate as subjective memories, drawing the artist—and now the audience—into a deeper contemplation of the passage of time and the future of our planet. Baik Art hopes that this exhibition not only resonates with the artist’s experiences but also aids in rekindling the lost connections with nature in our contemporary society.