I remember watching impressive movie called ‘Innerspace’ (1987). Denis Quaid, the main actor of the movie, plays the role of a pilot who participates in the scientific experiment and travels into the human body in a microscopic sized aircraft. The movie instantly came across my mind after having a meeting with Sim, Jun-Seub for the exhibition “Sound of Reaction”. For the past 8 years, most of the artist’s works consisted of sound installation using sounds and images created by artificial manipulation of the water flow. When I asked about the motivational beginning of using water and sound in his works, he confessed that the idea came from “the tinnitus phenomenon which has started sometime in the past”. Searching for treatment, he found out the tinnitus was a transformed tone of some sound of water connecting the head and the brain. The artist’s personal pain is described in the space through a very specific and scientific process. As the leading character in the movie witnesses some physiological phenomena such as ‘increase of pulse’ or ‘excess of acid in the stomach’, viewers of the exhibition would be able to experience Sim’s ‘innerspace’ through his works. The sound that stimulates our nerves can be recognized only when we aware, has persistent and dynamic rhythms very much similar to the sound of continuously flowing water. The artist attempts the healing in his own manner by resembling and visualizing the sound that invisibly chases after him.


The way Sim visually represents the sound is as follows. He makes enormous structures by connecting dozens of PVC and iron pipes. The structures, which are reminiscent of a boiler room in a huge building, are installed both interior and exterior of the exhibition hall and disorderly connected in the whole space from the floor, where the artificial pond is located, to the ceiling. When viewers come in, a sensor monitors the movement and immediately sends a signal to two pumps. Then, a giant mechanism operates simultaneously and drifts water to in and out of the pipes. The floating water creates rhythmical sounds through the regular action of pumps, which received the signal from the motion sensor. In the meantime, noises from everyday scene are detected through a microphone attached to the PVC pipes on the right side of the wall. A device changes the auditory signal into visual images, and the images are projected onto the left wall with lasers. The round video image on the floor is shown by a beam projector with the actual water image and the manipulated virtual image of water. The plasma wavelength device installed near the entrance reacts to the sound from the exhibition space and the touch of the viewers. The existence of the viewers in the exhibition hall plays as human consciousness and the motion sensor as the nerves of the body. They become the starting point for the mechanism that overwhelms the spectators.

In this manner, the substance of the noise that ceaselessly followed the artist’s ears like a shadow reveals its faint existence to the whole world. The illusion that bothered him is turned into sharable sound and scientifically analyzed images to dilute his physical pain. The attitude of investigating subjective experience in an objective way entirely excludes ‘the existence of emotion’, which might be biologically related to nerve system. Through this process, Sim’s works cross over the boundary of the human body and circulate “the positive energy that changes tragedy into impression,” for his chronic illness is not anymore a pain rather a source of power to his artistic motivations.

Sook-jeen Oh (Director, Brain Factory)

Curator: Sook-jeen Oh