Sound has always advanced by breaking its own boundaries. In the early twentieth century, the Futurists brought the noise of industrial machinery into the realm of art. John Cage went further: in silence, he found that the world had never stopped making sound. R. Murray Schafer extended this further still, gathering everything from urban din to the rustle of wind into a single framework he called the soundscape, the idea that our entire sonic environment constitutes a kind of music. Each of these gestures pushed the same question forward: what is worth listening to? Today, that question has moved beyond the human ear altogether. Animal frequencies, the sonic traces of lives quietly erased from the city: listening has become an ecological practice, oriented toward what lies outside the boundaries of human perception.
SimLee Da Eun (b. 1995) works within this lineage, cracking open the walls we have built around our hearing. Since 2023, through her ongoing Universally Valid series, she has followed the trails of wildlife and endangered species, walking into ecosystems to listen, collect, and record. These excursions resist easy categorization, somewhere between a walk and a performance. The sounds she gathers are routed through microphones, speakers, and live-streaming devices into the exhibition space, where visitors are invited to physically operate the works and intervene in what they hear. The moment you turn the handle, passive reception becomes active participation. Her method, at its core, is to make the sounds of overlooked lives not just audible, but physical.
The title holds a deliberate paradox. “Universal validity” is a concept from formal logic: a condition that holds in all cases, for all beings, without exception. “You” is perhaps the least universal word in any language, referring to a single body, a particular set of senses, one irreducible life. SimLee places these two terms side by side and lets the friction between them ask the question: Whose way of sensing the world has quietly been made the standard? Whose experience has been called universal?
This exhibition is about Cat A, a fictional stray who wanders the streets around the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, as she does every day. Present everywhere, noticed by no one. SimLee has installed live audio-streaming devices across the surrounding neighborhood, feeding those sounds into the wooden structure in Lounge 3. When you turn the handles, the friction of gears and unbleached cloth folds into live environmental audio from five nearby sites, and what once sounded familiar slowly becomes strange. Your movements are captured by an overhead camera and transmitted to a circular screen in Lounge 2, where your path through the gallery is composited with Cat A's imagined route through Nowon-gu where the Buk SeMA is located. The moment you see your own movements overlaid with the cat’s trajectory, in a sudden and wondrous recognition, you realize you have been sharing a path all along. From there, Universally Valid Forest opens before you: a structure of wooden drawers holding the soil Cat A might have walked through, the feathers of a favorite bird, small stones from the edge of a stream, and the fictions of a life.
Sound never travels alone. It moves until it finds something to press against, and in that contact, in the reverberation, the overlap, the unexpected echo, it becomes more than vibration. It becomes a way of reaching toward something outside yourself. The moment you reach for the handle, you have already left your own sealed room. You are already inside the low, quiet frequencies of lives you were never taught to notice. That final act of attention ― the decision to let the unfamiliar in ― belongs, in the end, to you.
Viewing point
This exhibition is completed through visitor participation. By turning the handle of Universally Valid You, real-time sounds transmitted from different locations throughout Nowon-gu are reconfigured through the imagined footsteps of Cat A, allowing familiar everyday soundscapes to be perceived anew. Through five algorithms inspired by the auditory system of a cat, visitors are invited to experience the sensory layers embedded within everyday sounds―including their own―and to attune themselves to the presence of diverse beings inhabiting a shared acoustic environment.
