Artist Ham Yang-ah builds new panorama of crisis and care

Ham Yang-ah's "Undefined Panorama 4.0" installed at Art Sonje Center in Seoul / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center

Media artist Ham Yang-ah has returned to Art Sonje Center after 16 years with a panoramic meditation on crisis, coexistence and listening, in a new solo exhibition that expands her long-term research project into an immersive, circular universe of images, bodies and voices.

Ham Yang-ah / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center

The exhibition, titled “Yang Ah Ham: Undefined Panorama,” brings together new and existing works from the artist’s eight-year project “Undefined Panorama,” which dissects contemporary social systems — from finance and politics to education and labor — through layered video installations and diagrams.

First launched in the wake of the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster that shook Korean society, the project began with a simple but urgent question: “As an artist, what should I do?” Ham recalled in a press briefing Thursday, explaining she wanted to understand “where all this pain begins,” beyond the scale of individual lives.

At the heart of the exhibition on the second floor is the new eight-channel video installation “Undefined Panorama 4.0” (2026), presented inside a monumental circular structure that visitors enter like a plaza, surrounding themselves with continuous moving images.

The 22-minute work revisits key moments in recent global history — from the Cold War and the rise of neoliberalism to the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic — while tracing their concrete effects on human bodies and everyday life.

“When I started ‘Undefined Panorama,’ people asked me, ‘Do you know the definition of panorama? It’s 360 degrees,’” Ham said. “Back then I divided the world into what I could handle. Over time the world grew bigger, and now the circular installation lets people stand inside, surrounded by the world they’re part of. For me, this panorama is a form of abstraction — a space where many seemingly unrelated lives and events create a shared structure.”

Ham Yang-ah's "Undefined Panorama 2.0" (2019) / Courtesy of the artist

The circular form, she added, deliberately departed from the 19th-century European panorama’s triumphant, colonial gaze. “Originally, panorama was a dominant visual form, showing, ‘We achieved this world.’ I wanted a space more like a plaza, where different stories meet on equal footing, instead of one subject controlling the view.”

On the third floor, Ham introduced another new work “The Listening Speaker, The Speaking Other” (2026), a multichannel video installation derived from her ongoing web platform “Well or Square, Undefined Panorama Web Project.”

Here, the artist positions herself as the “listening speaker,” while the “talking others” are participants across the globe who record unedited monologues on their phones about everyday issues — climate anxiety, war, education, care and technology. Their anonymous videos form what she calls a “digital garden” of shared thought.

Ham Yang-ah's "The Listening Speaker, The Speaking Other" (2026) installed at Art Sonje Center in Seoul / Courtesy of Art Sonje Center

“Wikipedia is a knowledge archive, but there is no archive of how we feel,” Ham said. “I see this project as a kind of emotional archive of our time, where you can see what people in different places, at the same moment, are worrying about and hoping for.”

In one channel, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands complains about unbearable heat. In another, a Korean street artist from Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, reflects on waste, guilt and creating a performance about El Nino. Elsewhere, a Korean woman living in Germany speaks of her fear that her son might be drafted if war spreads, while a refugee from Gaza recalls learning to distinguish civilian and military aircraft by sound as a child.

“When we understand at least one part of someone’s story, we stop seeing them as an enemy,” Ham said. “Given how conflicts are deepening, I think everything must start from listening.”

The exhibition also revisits earlier pieces including “The Sleep” (2015-16), a two-channel video installation set in a gym-turned-shelter that uses sleep as a metaphor for fear, control and system failure during disaster.

Ham Yang-ah's "Hunger 2.0" (2023) / Courtesy of the artist

“Hunger 2.0” (2023) examines structural hunger in late capitalist societies through scenes of people collecting discarded food under signs like “Climate Variability” and “Price Control.”

Another work titled “What People Learn I” (2021-22) reconsiders care and learning beyond institutional frameworks, highlighting touch, nonverbal communication and intergenerational narratives.

“It took a very long time, working on ‘Undefined Panorama,’ for me to realize that this path is, in Ardent’s words, a path of loving the world,” she wrote in her notes. “I found that the works I have made over 30 years are not just a person’s gestures, but attempts to touch this world.”

Ham Yang-ah's "What People Learn I" (2021-22) / Courtesy of the artist

The exhibition runs until Oct. 4 at Art Sonje Center in central Seoul.