Lee Hae-rin is a City Desk reporter at The Korea Times, covering social issues, tourism and taekwondo. She is passionate about speaking up for the rights of minorities, including women, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities and animals as well as discovering the latest makgeolli trend in town. Feel free to reach her at lhr@koreatimes.co.kr.
French, Korean artists to reimagine sound at Sejong Center
From left, sound artist Remi Klemensiewicz, haegeum player Kim Ye-ji and viola d’amore player Olivier Marin attend a roundtable interview for the joint sonic theater project "Wind Alone, Sand Alone — Make No Sound," in Seoul, Monday. Courtesy of Sejong Center for Performing Arts
By Lee Hae-rin
Sejong Center for the Performing Arts will open its contemporary “Sync Next 26” season with an ambitious Franco-Korean sonic theater project that blurs the boundaries between music, language and everyday sound.
Titled “Wind Alone, Sand Alone — Make No Sound,” the world premiere brings together three artists from Korea and three from France who treat sound not as a finished product but as a living process shaped by encounters and relationships. The performance is part of celebrations in Korea and France for the 140th anniversary of diplomatic ties.
Haegeum performer Kim Ye-ji, geomungo player Sim Eun-yong and jeongga singer Cho Yoon-young, sound artist Remi Klemensiewicz, viola d’amore player Olivier Marin and vocalist Christian Ploix will share the Sejong S Theater stage from July 3 to 5, before touring France and the United Kingdom in October.
Jeongga is a genre of Korean vocal music that developed in aristocratic and court circles that is characterized by slow tempos, subtle ornamentation and a close relationship with poetic texts. The haegeum is a traditional two-stringed bowed instrument, while geomungo is a six-stringed zither.
The production is presented as a “sonic theater,” an open-ended performance form that expands music into space, text and gesture rather than a conventional concert.
“We call it 'sonic theater' because even the sound of the air conditioner, or the lighting system getting turned on and off, can become part of the music,” Kim said during a roundtable with Korean media, Monday, stressing that audience shouldn't be afraid of music labeled “experimental.”
Poster of "Wind Alone, Sand Alone — Make No Sound," the opening sonic theater project of Sejong Center for the Performing Arts' "Sync Next 26" season / Courtesy of Sejong Center for Performing Arts
The project is the centerpiece of Sync Next 26, Sejong Center’s fully self-produced contemporary season, and one of the key events celebrating 140 years of Korea-France ties.
Kim traced the project’s roots back to a 2024 residency at Art Omi in New York, where she and Marin first met in cultural exchange. Kim said she was struck by Marin’s fascination with how Korea preserved certain strands of its traditional music, in contrast to the “erasure” he feels in parts of Europe, and by how the resonance strings of the viola d’amore echo the timbre of Korean instruments.
“We thought the instrument’s peculiar resonance — the sympathetic strings vibrating under the main strings — matched very well with haegeum,” she recalled, adding that their collaboration continued through mutual invitations to each other’s project in France and Korea.
What began as a plan to commission one composer from each country evolved into a collective creation by six performers, structured around the relationship between sound and language.
Klemensiewicz, a Seoul-based artist who has long worked between visual art, sound installation and experimental music, said the team is less interested in “fusion” than in finding balance among many overlapping elements.
“We have Korean traditional techniques, European medieval music and electronic sound,” he said. “The challenge is to let these very different materials meet smoothly, not just collide for the sake of it.”
The three described the performance as a set of flexible “chapters” that can be reconfigured in each venue, from Sejong Center to the Ilmin Museum of Art and the Guimet. “Beyond the concrete sounds that change with each space, the overall musical structure will also be rearranged,” Kim said, calling this adaptability “a crucial part of the project.”
Haegeum player Kim Ye-ji speaks during the roundtable interview for the joint sonic theater project titled "Wind Alone, Sand Alone — Make No Sound," in Seoul, Monday. Courtesy of Sejong Center for Performing Arts
In shaping the work, the three artists said they are less interested in “fusing” traditions than in deciding what each culture must keep and what it can afford to bend.
Kim said the distinctive shakes and slides in her haegeum are essential “fingerprints” of Korean music, and adjusts their weight so they can intertwine with viola d’amore and electronic sounds without losing their identity.
In turn, Marin and Klemensiewicz said they respond by loosening their own classical and electronic habits to accommodate those textures. Together, they frame contemporary collaboration as a practice of balance, where each instrument takes turns leading, blending and receding so that no single tradition dominates the sonic field.
All three artists offered their own definitions of “contemporary,” pushing back against the idea that the term simply means radical deconstruction.
“In our context, contemporary means showing how we live, through music,” Kim said. “We live in a time where each tradition is inevitably mixed — AI (artificial intelligence) is part of our lives, devices are always with us — so our very meeting becomes one form of contemporary practice.”
Marin framed the contemporary artist as a “crossroads,” saying, “In French, ‘contemporain’ literally means to live in one’s own time,” he said. “A contemporary artist connects different times and different places, liking past and present, East and West, and asks new questions.”