Kumho Museum

2026 금호영아티스트 1부

Donghoon Gang is an artist, composer, and researcher based in Germany and Korea. Working across visual and auditory media, he explores convergent and alternative modes of expression. Grounded in comparative musicology, music psychology, and philosophy, his practice centers on sonic elements, including the appropriation of musical languages and collaborations with instrumental performers. Gang's practice begins with a self-awareness of his position as an East Asian artist working with Western music, and develops into a critical inquiry into the system we call “music” as a construct shaped by historical and political conditions. This awareness is linked to the modern, visually centered knowledge framework that has long treated hearing as a subordinate sense, a hierarchy the artist critically reexamines. As a result, his work minimizes visual language while foregrounding sound as a means of expanding sensory experience. In recent years, drawing on his research into modern and contemporary Korean music history, Gang has focused on the role played by auditory media in psychological warfare and propaganda shaped by war and ideology. The exhibition Triglossia examines the emergence of South Korea's broadcasting institutions during the post–Cold War period, situating their formation within broader political and social contexts. It constitutes the “South–North” chapter of the ongoing series East · West · South · North, which unfolds across both exhibition and publication formats.
 

The exhibition title Triglossia refers to a sociolinguistic phenomenon in which three distinct languages are used in parallel within a single community for political and social reasons. Adopting this concept as a theoretical framework, Gang examines how radio, one of the central mass media of modernization and colonialism, has functioned across individual, communal, and political contexts. He developed a fictional drama text set during the turbulent period of Japanese colonial rule, when competing ideologies intersected and collided. Produced in collaboration with voice actors and musicians, the drama is recorded and staged as an immersive environment structured through multi-channel spatial sound. Through song lyrics, narrative composition, and character dialogue, visitors experience the historical atmosphere of the period through listening. The work foregrounds the conditions through which sound is historically constructed while extending the formal possibilities of the invisible auditory medium.