Woojae Kim: 120hz (for you who have taught me to think about the world I am passing on)
September 17 – October 17, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday October 18, 2026 7–10pm
Closing Performance: TBC
In Woojae Kim’s installation I Hear a Silent Dissonance (2024), he taught himself to make and play percussive instruments inspired by Korean untangle (풀이) rituals. In the tradition, unusual weather patterns such as long draughts are considered the consequence of having an imbalanced relationship with one’s ecosystem. During the ritual, participants become collectively absorbed in a gradually accelerating percussive rhythm, with the intention of developing physical and energetic synchronicity, and restoring social and ecological balance.
The intensification of fire weather–which is undeniably a consequence of humans’dissonance–catalysed this project. Coming into contact with wild fire and its aftermath compelled Kim to pay closer attention to the aural resonance of the phenomena. In the text that accompanies the work, he writes:
Listen to the thickness of the hide.
Listen to the contractions of muscles.
Listen to the volume of air in the drum.
Listen to the tension of the cord pulling the hide.
Listen to the texture of the wood.
Listen to the porousness of burnt trees.
The intelligence of taste, touch, smell and hearing are central to the artist’s practice. He is curious about what these senses perceive that vision overlooks. For Kim, learning about the construction of percussive forms and experimenting with how to play them, are means of embodied listening. Through improvisation, he explores how subtle changes in breath, posture and gesture affect an instrument’s feedback, which in turn, impresses upon other players and influences the rhythm.
For his new work 120Hz (for you who have taught me to think about the world I am passing on) (2026) Kim expands upon I Hear a Silent Dissonance by listening to electricity, which is one of the most ubiquitous yet under-acknowledged sounds in our environment. The audible vibration produced by a 60Hz electrical cycle is the hum of productivity and consumption. It encourages us to work through darkness, spoils us with goods from all over the world, and overwhelms us with access to information. It is a sound that our behaviour produces, and that has a detrimental effect upon us and all living beings. In his text for the show he writes,
I am afraid to make a sound,
adding to the noise
warning of a threat that feels far off and slow-coming.
All of us
live like we won’t be here to hear it.
For the exhibition, Kim experiments with the conditions of this behavioural noose, by establishing a closed auditory loop between an amplified 120Hz drone and handmade percussive instruments. In the processing circuit, variable opportunities arise for gestures made within the gallery to modify the signal. 120Hz is a spatial meditation on the impact of our habits and the reverberations they generate.
Following its presentation at Pale Fire, 120hz (for you who have taught me to think about the world I am passing on) will be presented at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, Alberta from November 7, 2026 to January 16, 2027.
Woojae Kim is a Korean artist and writer living on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver, Canada). His works explore rituals of interdependency and listening to inaudible frequencies of relationships with non-humans and the land.
His work has recently been exhibited in Vancouver (Artspeak, Dreams Comma Delta, Afternoon Projects), Toronto (The Plumb) and New York (Psychic Readings*). His texts have been published in the Canadian Art and the Capilano Review. Kim received an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.