“What does it mean to be good at music, to perform in a famous hall, to arouse curiosity, and what is power in a capitalism?”
* This sound is music from Mozart's opera <The Queen of the Night>, sung by Florence Foster Jenkins. Florence Foster Jenkins was an American icon, known as a “out-of-tune” soprano. With a huge inheritance from her parents, she was able to pursue her singing career regardless of her singing skills and even performed at Carnegie Hall.
What kind of music did you grow up listening to?
The first album I bought spontaneously when I was younger was a compilation of orchestras and piano pieces and things like that. I didn't really buy it because I wanted to, but because I used to go to the local record store in Sinchon when I was in elementary school, and I didn't know what I wanted to buy, and I was learning piano, so I thought, “Let's buy a record of music that I know.”
The next record I bought really spontaneously was Seo Taiji and the Boys. That was it until elementary school. After that, the musical experience of adolescence is important to me. In middle school, I liked the Pipi Band, and my older brother influenced me to listen to hip-hop records like Tupac. Then I listened to Crying Nut and what was then called Choseon-punk and realized that oh, I liked this kind of music. I especially liked the music of No Brain, when Cha Seung-woo was a member of, and I went to see their club performances through a internet community(Daum Cafe) that informed me of their performance schedule, and I enjoyed listening to compilation albums like Our Nation, Lunchbox Commandos, and B.L.E.X.. At that time, there were only a few licensed CDs, and imported CDs were expensive, so I couldn't buy everything I wanted, so I listened to them through people who put music on blank CDs and sold them illegally.
I also used to hang out at ‘Backstage’, a music listening room in Hongdae, drinking Coke and listening to other people's requests for music. What I was watching and listening to at the time were records from iconic 90s bands like the Smashing Pumpkins, Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, Radiohead, and videos from festivals like Woodstock. I don't know if it's because I'm a women, but Gwen Stefani was the person I was ultimately drawn to at the time. When I was in high school, I went to see No Doubt's concert at Euljiro Triport Hall, and I thought she was so cool and I wanted to be just like her. I didn't like all of her music, but the lyrics to the song “Just a Girl” really grabbed me.
Can you tell us about your most memorable auditory experience from your childhood to the present?
It was a festival. When I was in high school, Ssamji Sound Festival was held for the first time, and I remember the shock of seeing festivals like Woodstock and Glastonbury, which I had been studying, listening to, and admiring, unfold in front of me. At that time, I used to stick festival tickets in my diary and look at them to recall how I felt that day.
After that first festival, I also remember a another small Ssamji Sound Festival at the Sampyo Soy Sauce Factory on December 24, 1999. The entrance fee was free or a thousand won, I remember getting a lot of 'Dalki'(Character of Ssamzi) goods and soy sauce. I think I vaguely started to think about the social role of corporations at that time. I vividly remember admiring the fact that two companies, Samji and Sampyo, collaborated to create a performance and that a soy sauce factory could be transformed into a performance venue. As soon as the performance ended, there was another performance on the streets of Hongdae. It was a smaller festival-like event, with a lineup that overlapped with the one at the soy sauce factory. At the time, I was happy to watch the same show all day long. It was fun to go to the festival and dance, slam, play, and watch people have fun, and I dreamed of being on a stage like that one day.
If someone were to read this interview, they might assume you're in a rock band. You studied traditional Korean vocal and made your debut as a performing artist with <No longer Gagok>. Perhaps your work was born out of the gap between the stage you aspired to and the traditional music you learned. Much of your early work, including <No longer Gagok>, questions the present state of the songs you sing, and when we met four years ago at <Senggi Taengcheon>, you said that you wondered if those questions were still valid. It's been another four years since then, how valid are those questions and how have they changed?
Some things have changed a lot, and some things are coming back. For example, things like the climate crisis, which were not close to our skin before, the terrible effects of industrialization, which many people were already talking about but didn't recognize, and the problems that arise from the subordination of human life to capitalism, are now being felt in a very real way. I felt I have to go back to work, and now I realize that the questions that I thought might have expired are actually questions that cannot be expired. To be more specific, my early work was about connecting my personal issues with colonialism, but I was skeptical about the point of talking about imperialism and colonialism today, when the internet has started to differentiate cultural classes in different ways and we already have citizens who cannot be classified by nationality. It seemed silly to still think in terms of the past and dragging a changed era and generation into the past.
I stopped working on it for two or three years because I thought it was pointless, but now I'm coming back to the idea that what happened in the past and what's happening now is not at all different. I think it's a question that can't go away because in the end, what matters is that when there is power, there are cultural hierarchies, and there are problems that arise because of that. I think the pandemic was a trigger for me. I realized that we can't just accept the life we're given, we have to wake up and resist strongly, and in the process of resisting, we need the skill of 'living differently', and I think that's what I have to do as an artist and what I can do best, so I have to keep working without a doubt.
You recently presented <The Wind Blows from the Mountain Where Spirits Gathered> (2023) at the Ob/Scene Festival. Is this work about the questions you are talking about?
The simplest way to describe this work is that it is performed 'Ryung-San-Hoi-Sang' in the dark, without producing any images. It started out as a critique and reflection on capitalism and industrialization. I kept thinking about this never-ending question of what kind of music I should make, and about capitalism, industrialization, materialism, and all these things, and then one day I took a class with Helena Norberg-Hodge at EBS TV program <Great Minds>. When I heard her talk about the need to return to the local, the direction of my work became clear.
First of all, I was thinking about what I'm tired of now, and I'm tired of videoing and broadcasting performances during the pandemic. A performance is something that exists in the moment and then dissipates. A sense of community is created and intertwined by the people sharing the scene. So how can a video be a substitute for a performance? It's definitely not a performance. When NFTs came to the forefront of the art world during the pandemic, performances that had all the elements of performance removed began to be sold. I thought it was ironic that a performance that exists as an immaterial thing in the material world is materialized and sold in the virtual world, which is an immaterial world.
The idea of materializing the performance and selling it somehow was really creepy, and I thought that capitalism had gone too far. I started my work thinking about how I could explain this feeling. My initial direction was to create something that cannot be owned, cannot be sold, and cannot be recorded. In the process, I brought in the concept 'Poong-ryu' and branched out from there.
That’s a very resistant work.
I don't think I can work without resistant.
I think the use of darkness is effective. I like the idea that everything can be sold, so why not make it impossible to sell by capturing it? To put it in another perspective, when I was researching contemporary sound works, I felt that people were relying too much on visual. When I was studying at university, I used to read articles that criticized logocentrism and phallocentrism, and the orcularcentrism. At that time, the idea of criticizing orcularcentrism felt very vague to me. As someone who works with sound, do you find any effects of shutting out the visual?
If a listener voluntarily closes their eyes when a certain piece of music is playing, they're probably trying to focus on what they're hearing. But turning off the lights is not voluntary, and it's also a very violent act. So it seems like people don't know where to put their eyes. When blackout is forced, I think it can easily be read as an unnecessary performance. It's very difficult to think of something that music can do better when the visuals are completely removed. However, in this performance, the success of the music through darkness was not the goal from the beginning, so I can say that the reflection on industrialization was the effect of this performance.
In your previous work, you experimented with the form of listening. In <No Longer Gagok: Room 5>, you talked about how there are sounds that should be heard up close and sounds that should be heard from a distance, and sounds that should be heard even if they are uncomfortable, but I would like to hear more about that. What are some of the sounds that should be heard even if they are uncomfortable?
When I say that it should be heard up close, it's simply because the songs I majored in, the operas, don't sound great when they're amplified. In order for it to sound good in an environment where the audience is far away from the stage, there has to be an acoustic study done for the Gagok, and that hasn't been done. Maybe it's because sound acoustics are so dependent on personal preference, but in my experience, it sounds much better up close.
And the sounds you had to listen to, even if they were uncomfortable, were about the content, not the sound itself. In our current society, the flow of capital determines the music we listen to. It takes training or education to like something or to recognize it as music, and in the current society, it's not easy to develop your own taste because only powerful content is exposed to the public. It's not voluntary training or education, it's marketing to the public, and the power of capital is very much involved in that process. So I was talking about the idea that we need to seek out and listen to other sounds besides the music that comes naturally to us, including sounds that we didn't think of as music. The unfamiliar is uncomfortable, but we need to be uncomfortable and listen to something else.
As a musician, you're probably the one who present your work in museums the most. As a musician, I'm curious about the different considerations you have when working in a museum and a musical venue like concert hall.
Honestly, I don't have much of an identity as a musician. I don't know if it's because I have a complex that I'm not good at music, but I consider myself a performing artist and that's my first identity. I'm often asked what my process is when I create a performance, and I think I do it simultaneously. The music, the atmosphere, the materials, how to arrange the audience, everything is intertwined and comes to me in an instant. On the other hand, when I make music, I don't have answers and someI don't know what to do. So when I make music for pure listening, sometimes i think I don't know what i am.
When I make a performance, I think about what kind of structure and format I want to use to reveal my current thoughts, but in the case of music, the problems is the music itself. I'm constantly thinking about whether I should be a producer or whether I can't be satisfied as a listener.
Why is performing art important to you?
Going back to my childhood, I grew up as a normal teenager listening to popular music, and then I went to Gugak High School. At the time, I was excited, eager, and simply curious to go to a music school, but when I got there, I realized that not many of my friends were interested in music. Moreover, the school was very authoritarian. As I became bored with school, I naturally looked around at my environment. Then I started to have a question about performances.
The school made it mandatory for students to see the performance, and while the music was fun, the performance was not. I thought that when I grew up, I would learn stage art and directing so that I could create performances that would make this music look great. In the end, I didn't learn stage art or directing, but I naturally ended up creating performances.
I get the impression that you have a very defined view of sound, music, and art. When I was struggling with the concept between entertainment and art, you sent me a video link to a talk by Frie Leysen about the distinction between the two. I listened to the talk and at some points it became clearer, but it's still something ambiguous for me. Historically, there have been artists who have tried to break down the distinction between fine art and popular culture, and some of their work has been incorporated back into the history of fine art. Can you explain your point of view again?
First of all, I have a point of view that distinguishes between art and entertainment, sometimes art can function as entertainment, but I don't think all art is entertainment. To answer the question above, popular culture is based on industry, and industry is based on mass production, materialization, buying and selling. So should art affirm this? Even if you are not an artist, but who lives in a time of climate crisis, when we might be the last generation of humanity, it seems natural to question the act of materializing everything. The form and definition of art will vary from society to society, but what I want to do as an artist in 2023 is to inspire an imagination that breaks the cycle of mass production and industrialization. In that sense, in my mind, there is a distinction between pop culture and art.
ﾠ
It seems like you have a story to tell or a responsibility as an artist, not entertainer. What do you think is the role of an artist?
A person does not need to exist for something, but it seems to me that the presence of artists on a social level contributes to diversification. I would like to emphasize that I am talking about art in a very narrow sense, because the word art, when used pragmatically, includes many things in a broad sense. Artists do not strive to entertain others. They strive to create their own world, free from given rules and competition, and for this they explore and propose new ideas. The world of artists contains its own philosophy and wisdom, because the purpose of their actions is thought itself.
Then, does your latest duo, Haepaary, have a different direction from your solo work as an artist?
Haepaary is a two-person team, so my opinion can't represent Haepaary. Up close it's the opposite direction, and from a distance it's the same direction. I've always dreamed of being a small citizen of the popular music scene with Haepaary's music, and that's my goal with Haepaary: to enter the popular music industry. The goal of Haepaary is different from my personal work, which is about critiquing capitalism through pop culture, industrialization, and mass production, but from a distance, there is some shared ground. In the current music industry, it is very difficult to participate in the pop music scene with traditional musical language. It's about breaking the rules of the industry, so I think it's a form of resistance in itself.
What is Haepaary's strategy? I think the starting point of translating men's songs into women's is quite interesting, but I also think that music that combines traditional vocal techniques with electronic music quickly loses its 'entertainment' value when it is a long-term activity rather than a project.
I want to release a lot of new music and exist for a long time. What I'm wary of is becoming an 'ornament' in the music scene, because so many traditional musicians who have been active in the popular music scene have given me the impression of being an ornament. My goal with Haepaary is to become another popular musician, not a special or ignored one, but a normal and equal member of the musical society, and to do that, I need to work hard and exist as music. Lack of confidence in my music is an only obstacle.
ﾠ
You often active in contemporary music scene and the improvisational music scene that surrounds it. Do you have a affection for contemporary music?
There was a time when I was drawn to contemporary music, and I'm embarrassed to say that I did anything great there, but there was a time when I was drawn to improvised music anyway. It's like an adolescent thing. I was fascinated by the post-war avant-garde music of the 1950s and 1960s, and I think it was probably because I studied Korean traditional music, so I was drawn to music that was still based on their traditions, and had a very clear zeitgeist. I don't do contemporary music now, but I think their spirit is still cool, and I think I express that spirit well enough in my work.
What is the spirit of contemporary music that you think is cool?
I would describe it in one word, resistance. I'm not in a position to introduce myself as a contemporary musician, so it would be embarrassing to talk about it at length. Recently, one of my friends looked at my fortune on an app and said that I have “revolutionary depression” In my fate, even depression is revolutionary. (laughs).
You've said many times that a rock band has been a longtime dream of yours, and it looks like you finally realized that dream this year. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're working on?
I play in a punk band for fun. About two years ago I posted on social media that I wanted to start a punk band, and my friend WHI said I should do it. I started learning bass earlier this year, and I reached out to WHI again to start a band, so that's how it started. Our theme is 'let's not just do what we're good at' and be a self-congratulatory punk band. I was thinking about who to play drums, and then I contacted Joyul and asked her to join us. At first, we were going to do a Siouxsie and the Banshees cover band, but it was too hard, so we're covering Bikini Kill songs, which I've loved for a long time. I was going to sing it myself, but I'm a beginner and I can't play instruments and sing at the same time, so we decided to get a vocalist. We're planning to perform soon.
When I follow your work, I thought that you’re very happy to work with women, including artists and staffs. If there is an art historian who writes about contemporary art in South Korea, it seems like an important current that can be written about.
I think I've always naturally worked with women, and I've always worked with women unless it's absolutely necessary for a particular task. Even if I don't try to do it on purpose, because I'm a woman, when I imagine someone doing something, it's hard to imagine anyone but a woman. For example, when I'm reading a novel and it says “I”, I naturally imagine it as a woman, and then halfway through I realize it's a man and it breaks my immersion, so it feels natural to be with female colleagues in those cases.
We're almost finished with the interview. My work is to explore the background of contemporary sound through interviews. As someone who has questioned and resisted contemporary life as much as anyone, I'm curious to know what contemporary means to you and what role your heritage of studying traditional music plays.
The first word that comes to mind when I think of contemporary is annihilation. It seems to be a sentiment shared by many artists and citizens, not just me. I think the current vocation of traditional music is diversity, and the reason why Korean traditional music is not going well is because of imperialism, but we can also think about the question of whether to let tradition disappear as it is, or to save it as minority languages. I think the existence of minority languages means that their way of life remains, and preserving it can contribute to deconstructing industrialization and materialism.
Is there an important sound that you want people to hear, even if it's not the sound of our time?
Rather than specific sounds, I’d like to see people make an effort in their lives to listen to sounds that they don't normally hear, I want people to consciously realize that there are so many different things in the world. We can't stop this huge flow of capital, but if we just live by what capitalism tells us to do, we're going to lose the ability to think. I think we need to consciously break our habits and try to find and listen to at least one song a day that we don't normally listen to, and try to listen to music that's not on the charts.