Two-channel sound, 2025

Shadowed Spaces is a sound work created during an artist residency at Gapado AiR on the tiny, remote island of Gapado, near Jeju, South Korea. It is a site-specific soundscape inspired by the residency buildings, which were originally intended as condominiums, but were abandoned when the construction company suffered bankruptcy in 1997.

The unfinished subterranean structures were left empty for twenty years and flooded by seawater, before being renovated and repurposed as artist accommodations, studios and an exhibition hall. The new design by architect Choi Wook retained the brutalist textures of the decaying complex and added an observatory tower and new concrete walls and columns.

Recordings of the indoor and outdoor spaces employ contact and electromagnetic microphones to reveal the hidden sounds of surface vibrations on windows and railings and the operational functions of the buildings, including wireless internet routers, radio static, air conditioners, dehumidifiers and electrical systems.

A small electronic keyboard, bells from a flea market and fragments of concrete and rusted metal found onsite were played within the reverberant spaces, the room surfaces adding echoes and resonance to the tones. Nature also appears in the form of birdsong and wind blowing through the courtyard, alongside the movements of other artists and staff, footsteps and sliding doors. 

The resulting work is an exploration of time, decay, materiality and resonance. It is an elegy for lost futures and an investigation of the presence of absence, the spectral traces of the past and the potential of place and architecture as containers of history and memory.

This work was shown in the inaugural exhibition of Gallery Remicon (formerly Myeongseung Hotel) and echoed the exhibition space’s history as an abandoned hotel transformed into an art space.