Friday, September 12, 5–5:30 PM
NARS Studio 418, 4th Floor
As part of our Art in Dialogue series and the Residency Programs Day, NARS Foundation is pleased to present Aria of Horn and Lament, a performance with Season III, 2025 Artist-in-Residence Kay Yoon.
Based between Munich and Seoul, South Korean artist Kay Yoon explores the haunted edges of cultural memory, technological mediation, and ritual embodiment. In her new performance at the NARS Foundation, Aria of Horn and Lament, she expands her concept of “emotional migration”—the translation of untranslatable emotions into vibration, voice, and movement—through a live sonic work that drifts between dreaming and waking, tradition and machinery.
Beginning with sleep-talking, Yoon crawls from her studio into the gallery, tracing the fragile passage from unconscious utterance to conscious voice, accompanied by ambient sounds and car horns that emerge and dissolve into breath and rhythm. The performance culminates with Yoon singing an arranged rendition of “Suktaemeori” (쑥대머리) from atop a ladder—a mournful aria from the Korean pansori Chunhyangga, in which the imprisoned Chunhyang laments her disorientation and separation from her lover, unreachable even in dreams.
As industrial noise meets inherited melody, Aria of Horn and Lament liquifies the boundaries between sleeping and singing, memory and migration. Yoon summons a voice not of arrival, but of restless becoming driven by the quiet labor of translating dislocation into form.
Musical arrangement by DC Tu.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition It would hurt us – were we awake –
Learn more about the exhibition
About the artist:
Kay Yoon (1994 Seoul, Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist based between Munich and Seoul. Her practice navigates spectral zones between cultural memory, technological mediation and embodied ritual. Drawing from Korean folk traditions and inherited structures of Western modernity, Yoon investigates how cultural rituals, family histories, and ideological systems persist, transform, and mutate across temporal and geographical boundaries. Working across sound installations, performance, poetry, and spatial interventions, Yoon creates immersive environments that channel fragments of past and future through a critically nostalgic lens. Her practice interrogates how technology mediates spiritual and ceremonial experiences, uncovering new forms of ritual emerging from contemporary landscapes and questioning linear concepts of time and memory.
