Eight-channel sound, speakers, 2025

Courtyards and Arcades is a spatial multi-channel sound installation created for Pavilion Osol, an urban public art project set in Sewoon Plaza. It is positioned between Sewoon Sangga, South Korea’s first modern arcade opened in 1968, and Jongmyo Shrine, which holds five centuries of Joseon Dynasty royal shrines.

The sound work explores the contrasting atmospheres and acoustic identities of two sites, creating a dialogue that shifts between the still, ritual quiet of Jongmyo Shrine and the fragmented urban textures and electric buzz of Sewoon Sangga.

Static recordings of cicadas, birdsong and footsteps in the courtyards of Jongmyo are juxtaposed with audio drifts through the electronics and appliance shops of Sewoon Sangga’s labyrinthine arcades.

Musical elements join these environmental sounds in the form of humming electronic drones created with a vintage synthesizer, balanced against pastoral orchestral loops.

The installation becomes a sonic axis, a channel through which these two places speak to one another. It echoes the layering of memory and texture at the threshold of these spaces and the interplay between the organic and synthetic, tradition and modernism, history and the everyday.

Credits

Sound art by Wil Bolton
Architecture by Taewon Park
Curated and produced by Team.Seohwa
Video courtesy of Team.Seohwa