'What am I listening to right now?' — Yang In-mo and Kimchi and Chips create a performance beyond narrative

A special concert at GS Arts Center on Tuesday

Violinist Yang In-mo collaborates with media art duo Kimchi and Chips

Korean premiere of Julia Wolfe's 'LAD' among highlights

Violinist Yang In-mo teams up with media art duo Kimchi and Chips for a fresh take on classical performance. [GS Arts Center]

Sweeping melodic variations, a climax where tension finally breaks — the familiar grammar of conventional dramatic performance is stripped away entirely. In its place, audiences are invited to "see music and hear light."

Violinist Yang In-mo cemented his place as classical music's "young heart" by sweeping the Paganini and Sibelius competitions. He now joins forces with Kimchi and Chips, a media art duo whose work weaves together the material and the immaterial. On Tuesday evening, GS Arts Center in Gangnam, Seoul, will host a boldly conceived program pairing the two — one that proposes a new grammar for classical music.

Though they have traveled entirely different artistic paths, the two recognized each other from their very first meeting. In a written interview, Kimchi and Chips admitted they initially hesitated to propose the collaboration, worried about "the burden of combining two arts with such different textures." It was Yang who put those concerns to rest. From their first conversation, the two ranged across topics including the music of Morton Feldman, minimalism, conceptual art and new forms of narrative.

"Talking with Yang In-mo, I had a clear sense that we could do something exciting and genuinely fun," Kimchi and Chips said.

As they developed the performance, the two established a foundational premise for the collaboration: setting aside their respective musical and visual grammars. Kimchi and Chips defined the collaboration itself as "the act of abandoning the grammar each of us is accustomed to," adding that rather than each giving up their own language, "we worked by layering each other's sensibilities onto our own."

The process was not easy. Yang said he "explored a vast number of 20th-century and contemporary works that could be read as a single narrative of the passage of time and states of being," and that "it took courage and a spirit of challenge to conceive and realize a program that embraces both continuity and diversity."

Media art duo Kimchi and Chips joins violinist Yang In-mo for a fresh take on classical performance. [GS Arts Center]

Where a conventional dramatic arc once stood, time, space, music, resonance and light now fill the void. The audience, too, is folded into the mix — the resulting "state" of shared presence becomes the performance itself. "The work comes to hold its own force, like a living organism," Kimchi and Chips said.

"That moment, that place, that stage, those audience members, the light, the breath, the drifting particles of haze — all of it interweaving, and unexpected emotions erupting here and there, large and small. That is what we are hoping for," Kimchi and Chips said.

The choice of light as the central medium was deliberate. Kimchi and Chips said they were careful to ensure that "neither the visual nor the musical element dominates the other," explaining that "the immateriality of light elegantly draws out the physical mass of the walls and objects that make up the stage." The duo also factored in the risk that using too many physical materials would pose given the short installation window.

The format breaks from the conventions of a standard classical concert. Rather than dividing the evening into two halves with an intermission, the performance runs as a single, condensed 60-minute flow. The program Yang carefully assembled is organized around the axis of "time," bringing Bach, Steve Reich and Julia Wolfe into resonance on the same stage.

"The historical dogma of Bach as a Baroque composer is not particularly important on this stage," Yang said. "I wanted to illuminate the musical patterns and repetitions he built — not as a specific style, but fully within the expansive concept of 'time.'"

The Korean premiere of "LAD" by contemporary composer Julia Wolfe is among the evening's most daring choices. Originally built around the overwhelming sonic pressure and drone sound of nine bagpipes, the piece will be reinterpreted by Yang on a single violin.

Yang recalled that "when I first heard this piece several years ago, I wept for reasons I could not explain," adding that he had "almost never felt such an intense emotion listening to contemporary music." For this performance, he worked from an arrangement by British violinist Rakhi Singh, refining the sonic palette in meticulous detail alongside a sound engineer.

"Two dissonant notes sliding toward each other until they finally reach the octave — that gesture sounded to me like a longing for unity. I plan to introduce several types of guitar effect pedals to experiment with the texture of the sound, and with the help of electronic acoustics, to realize the original work's polyphonic structure in an entirely new way," Yang said.

Even without a dramatic arc, the performance has no shortage of devices to draw audiences in. Kimchi and Chips said that "even with the narrative structure erased, the ensemble of elements the performance holds is spectacular in its own right," adding that rather than imposing a single through-line message, they "visualized through the movement of light the variations, repetitions and contingencies that are perceived differently from moment to moment."

The destination the two artists ultimately seek is a shared "state" in which even the presence of the artist dissolves. Kimchi and Chips said that "although it is the artist who sets a work in motion, through the long process you witness the work itself evolving and growing," and expressed hope that "this performance, too, will hold force as an independent organism — that the moment, the place, the breath on stage, the drifting particles of haze, and the audience will interweave and become a single state from which unexpected emotions erupt."

Because this is not a performance whose arc can be predicted from start to finish, the anxiety and uncertainty the two artists face becomes fresh energy that drives the work forward. Yang said he hopes the performance leaves audiences asking, "What am I listening to right now?" Kimchi and Chips said they hoped "the roughly one thousand audience members filling the hall will each go home carrying a small, fluttering spark in their chest."

shee@heraldcorp.com