금호미술관

Gang Donghoon 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. 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 in 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[1], which unfolds across both exhibition and publication formats.

The exhibition title Triglossia refers to a sociolinguistic phenomenon in which three distinct languages are used simultaneously 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 colonialization, has functioned across individual, communal, and political contexts. He draws on The Dawn Bell (1926), the first domestically produced radio drama in Korea, which interwove Korean and Japanese, and Cheongsil Hongsil (1956), the first serialized radio drama. Through these references, he develops a fictional radio drama text situated in a period of turbulent ideological convergence under the enduring conditions of Japanese colonial rule and the U.S. military government. He then collaborated with voice actors and musicians to record the radio drama, constructing an organic exhibition space in which narrative, structure, and sensory experience are interwoven through a tripartite listening format. Within the exhibition space, early domestically produced radios from South Korea—including the GoldStar A-501, the Samyang 5S-1A, and a model by Cheonwoo—are displayed as historical artifacts. A drama incorporating Korean, Japanese, and English is broadcast simultaneously across multiple speaker channels. The multilingual soundscape evokes the linguistic environment of the period, condensing the political tensions and conflicts embedded within it. Drawing on the conventions of theatrical staging, the exhibition reconstructs these scenes through an auditory and spatial composition. In this process, Gang extends the experimental potential of an invisible auditory medium and articulates the physical and psychological dimensions of the listening experience with greater depth.

[1] The previously published East · West (2025) by Gang Donghoon addresses the history of popular music in South Korea, tracing the trajectories of Korean musicians who traveled to Europe for study.