SEOUL.- DOOSAN Art Center presents The Multilingual, a special exhibition of DOOSAN Humanities Theater 2026, on view from June 24 to August 1. Questioning conventional classifications such as nationality, gender, language, and age, the exhibition explores ways of understanding human beings as complex, fluid, and ever-changing. Through distinctive visual languages—including indirect ways of seeing, misunderstanding, abstraction, simultaneity, layering, and concealing—Choey Eun Young Cho, Chung Seoyoung, Gim Ikhyun and IM Youngzoo present fluid portraits of humanity shaped by layers of time, memory, and relationships.
Working between Korea and the United States, Choey Eun Young Cho has developed a practice that treats language as material, drawing on her experience of displacement and linguistic dissonance. I Ordered a New Body and It Never Came (2026) unfolds as an audio vignette composed of individual sequences that together form a larger whole. Across its five audio sequences, the sentences are transformed utterances that have passed through the bodies of others while being translated and revised several times. Conversations between the artist’s own Korean grandmother and an American elderly woman with whom she shares an equally familial bond gradually lose their original forms as they move back and forth between Korean and English through translation and the artist’s reading aloud. As the memories of the two women—separated by generation, language, ethnicity, and historical circumstance—pass from one person to another and from one language to another, the sentences that carry them gradually drift apart, wear away, and acquire unexpected rhythms. At the point where the boundaries between narrator and memory dissolve, multiple temporalities coexist, while language serves as an incomplete medium between them.
IM Youngzoo has long explored the formation of superstition, belief, and religious faith, examining the unstable boundary between technological desire and irrational conviction, as well as the relationship between individual and collective memory. Through the artist’s confessional narrative, Kakumei 鶴鳴 (2026) traces how a heritage that cannot be put into words is transmitted and transformed across generations. Interweaving her grandmother’s imitation of a crane’s call and her code-like Japanese with her mother’s crane dance, the work evokes sensations in which the remnants, transmission, rejection, and longing of shamanism remain entangled within a family. The boundaries between documentation and mimicry, tradition and remainder gradually loosen while continuing to hold together, revealing how gestures and embodied sensations endure across generations even after their original meanings have faded.
Through photography and image-based data, Gim Ikhyun has investigated the layered intersections of historical events, sites, and technological systems of vision. Installed in the window gallery, A Bronze Age (2026) reminds us that representation is never the recovery of a whole, but only the accumulation of fragments. By pointing to the omissions and acts of imagination embedded in the ways we remember history and people, the artist extends this perspective to the statue-building culture of and around Colonial Joseon and postwar Korea. His photographs document statues repeatedly demolished, relocated, and re-erected in response to shifting political conditions, revealing that systems of classification and commemoration are never complete or neutral. Instead, the truths that reach us through time emerge as traces that have been repeatedly deconstructed, confused, and retransferred.
Grounded in a poetic, open-ended contemplation of objects, Chung Seoyoung has continually revealed extraordinary moments in which unfamiliar combinations allow objects to become sculpture. Placed in the middle of the exhibition space, A Wanderer (2022) presents a mass patched with layers of cement, remaining in a tentative state of congealment, potentially everything and nothing at once. Its enigmatic form evokes the fluid nature of individuals composed of different layers of time and relationships. In the sound work Untitled–Track 2 (2012/2026), a person walks through residential streets, spontaneously describing what comes into view. The silences, omissions, and interferences of memory that occur while verbalizing the observations render our familiar everyday scenes unfamiliar. Within the gap of dissonance that arises as vision gets translated into language, the dynamics between sound and language become a sculptural event. Dissonance becomes a gap that enables a different reading and a different connection, not a failure of definition.
Excerpt from the Curatorial Note
Hyejung Jang (Chief Curator, DOOSAN Art Center DOOSAN Gallery)
My grandmother, who passed away last year, had been nicknamed “the multilingual grandma” at the nursing home where she had spent the final years of her life. Born in 1930, she gradually erased her present and drifted closer to her past, and as her language and cognition regressed to those of a child, she suddenly began speaking in a mixture of Japanese, English, and Korean. Hearing my mother tell me about grandma’s new nickname, I let out a brief sigh—perhaps of amazement, perhaps of grief—and in that moment, the grandmother I knew shattered into pieces and dispersed into the air.
Will I be able to retrieve these fragments? My understanding of my grandmother cannot escape a series of refractions and distortions. Therefore, regardless of the amount of effort, the grandmother I remember will move toward a new figure. This exhibition holds a thought for all individuals who are like my grandmother, who continued to shape her identity until the last moment of her life, and everyone around them entrusted with the role of remembering them. It is up to you to choose whom or what to recall and how to hold them in your heart.
Participating artists: Choey Eun Young Cho, Chung Seoyoung, Gim Ikhyun, IM Youngzoo
