[Gallery Walk] Inside the Exhibition Hall, Sound Resonated Before the Paintings

Kumho Museum of Art's “2026 Kumho Young Artist” Part 1
Solo Exhibitions by Kang Donghoon, Moon Juhye, and Seowonmi
Young Artists Shake Up the "Sensory Grammar" of Exhibition

Deeper inside the exhibition hall, a low reverberating sound reaches your ears first. Even before you look at the screens, the space already resonates as if it were a single apparatus. On one side, something resembling a human voice spreads quietly, while on the other, fragments—part music, part noise—seep into the ambience. Before you even look at the screens hanging on the walls, the entire exhibition space already feels like one integrated device.

Part 1 of the “2026 Kumho Young Artist” exhibition, which opened at the Kumho Museum of Art on Samcheong-ro, Seoul, greets visitors in this way. In most museums, your eyes are usually the first to move. But here, that order is reversed. Sound precedes paintings, arrangement comes before explanations. This is a change increasingly common in exhibitions by young artists these days. The grammar of exhibitions is shifting away from what is being said, toward how it is first experienced through the senses.

The Kumho Young Artist program has long observed this change. Since its launch in 2004, this initiative has provided artists aged 35 and under with opportunities for solo exhibitions, with more than 100 artists having participated to date. There are many programs for emerging artists. Often, these simply mention a name and move on. In most cases, it ends at a single mention. What still gives this program meaning is that it entrusts an entire floor of the exhibition space to a single artist, allowing viewers to experience their world in one continuous breath. Rather than "discovering" young artists, it is closer to establishing their not-yet-solidified language within institutional spaces. That is why these exhibitions are always similar, yet always different. While the format repeats, the sensibilities of each new generation subtly diverge every year.

In this exhibition, each floor presents a slightly different direction of sensory experience. On one floor, sound takes over the space first; on another, familiar images are subtly displaced; on the upper floor, the screen divides into day and night, evoking different senses of time.

In Kang Donghoon's “Triglossia,” this shift is first experienced through the ears. While described as a sound installation, it is more accurately a work that changes the listener’s posture. Voices, music, and dialogue overlap from multiple speakers, but the entire composition is never available to a viewer from a single spot. Depending on where you stand, you hear different fragments, which then assemble into a scene in your mind only afterward. The exhibition’s title “Triglossia” refers to the phenomenon of multiple language systems operating simultaneously within one community. Rather than explaining this concept as it appears in sociolinguistics textbooks, Kang Donghoon transforms it into an overlapping auditory experience. This is reminiscent of radios during the Cold War era, when information and propaganda, public language and private emotion, all shared the same frequency. He diffuses the moment when invisible sound organized an era, spreading it again across the floor and walls of the exhibition space.

Moon Juhye’s “Crosshair +++” unsettles familiarity from a different angle. The screen presents a composition reminiscent of a religious painting, yet also carries the tension of a game interface. These images cannot be easily categorized. The iconography of religious art and the grammar of games brush against each other within the same frame, and rather than pointing directly to meaning, the colors subtly deviate. Blue and red are no longer safely interpreted, and familiar symbols gradually slip out of their traditional positions. Images usually register before explanations. However, in front of these screens, that speed momentarily pauses. Just when you think you recognize something, the meaning slides away. This kind of slippage, commonly seen in the recent paintings of young artists, deliberately avoids direct statements and instead slows down the automatic response of interpretation.

Seowonmi’s “Grand Theater” addresses the most complex sense of time in the most painterly way. The exhibition is divided into day and night, but this is not merely a lighting effect; it changes the very rhythm with which the works are read. In the daytime room, outside events enter first; in the nighttime room, inner emotions come a little closer. Landscapes and figures are mixed, abstraction and figuration are intertwined, and the canvases hold past time and time yet to come all at once. Seowonmi’s paintings have always moved between event and emotion, but in this exhibition, the emphasis seems to tilt more from the outside to the inside. Yet it does not close in on personal confession. Instead, it shows how private feeling becomes a structure, a scene.

When you observe the Young Artist exhibition over time, you realize it is not a venue for ranking young artists in a single line. It is not about determining who is more accomplished or more marketable. Rather, it is a place to confirm the movements that are only possible because things are not yet settled. That is exactly what this first part demonstrates. Sound is no longer a mere auxiliary device, images are no longer immediately decipherable signs, and painting no longer ends within the confines of the screen. The three artists each follow a different path, but what they share is a retreat from explanation. In its place, arrangement, sound, surface, and rhythm take over.

Moon Juhye 'Crosshair PlusPlusPlus Crosshair +++' Exhibition View, 2026. Photo by Kumho Museum of Art

As you leave the gallery, the sound you first heard returns to mind—the sound that caught your ear before the paintings, the resonance that occupied the space before any explanation. While the Kumho Young Artist program introduces new faces each year, what remains is perhaps the subtle shift in how a generation senses the world. As you step out of the exhibition hall, that initial sound comes back to you. The exhibition runs through April 12.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.