HAN GIL JANG

In the Absence of
(2023)

Voice Breath Body
(2022)

Indexical Constellations (2021)

In the Absence of
2023

This performance is an attempt to bridge the discussions of voice and silence in two different fields, sound (art) and oral history, which is carried out as follows:

Choose a body the musical qualities of which you would like to evoke.
Put a driver-implemented mask on the body and connect it to an amplifier.
Insert in-ear microphones and cover them with earmuff.
Plug the in-ear microphones into Input 1 and 2 or a stereo input of the sound board.
Connect Sub Output to the amplifier for the driver-implemented mask.
Click “start recording” button of the patch.
The following excerpt will play for twenty-five times:

There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death.

Have the mask-wearer mouth the following passage in silence when the last loop plays back:

In the absence of official records or historical documents, we turn to bodies that bear witness. The bodies and their voices are the “living proof” of what has not been written down. Those who claim their voices as living proof must reconcile with the fact that all bodies that make sounds die. Bodies decay, just as sound does. What happens to the voice, then? What happens to the truth entailed thereby?

The driver built into the mask emits sound into the mouth of the wearer, which can be modulated by articulatory organs (lips, tongue, glottis, etc.), is captured by in-ear microphones. The sound modulated thus—which differs from the sound that comes straight out of the driver—is most of the time only audible to the wearer. This effect of "private voice" is somewhat like a reverse mechanism of voice production. Consider: When a person produces a voice, her speech is "voiced" in the vocal tract and articulated in the oral cavity, the final outcome of which exits the mouth and is heard via air conduction. In the particular situation of this performance, the sound from the mask is modulated in the oral cavity of the wearer, but that modulated sound only goes inside the throat of the receiver, audible mostly via bone conduction and therefore private to the wearer only. The mechanism of this setup has been mainly inspired by a Sakhalin Ainu “throating” game known as rekuxkara.

Yes, the body acts as a filter; it filters out all of the frequencies except the resonant ones. It has to do with the architecture, the physical dimensions and acoustic characteristics of the body…If the dimensions of a body are in a simple relationship to a sound that is played in it, that sound will be reinforced, that is, it will be amplified by the reflections from the inner surface.

Audio-visual performance
Duration: Approx. 30 min.
Premiered at SOMA Art Space Berlin

Date: August 12, 2023
Part of listen listening, an experimental broadcast platform and exhibition organized and produced by oolongradio

Huge thanks to Jiyoung Yoon

Voice Breath Body and Pacific March
2022

Voice Breath Body is a video essay on verbal testimonies and their place in the aftermath of state and colonial violence—or, to use a more contested term, “genocide”—where so-called “reliable” evidence or official documents thereof are scant or absent. The video juxtaposes footage of endoscopy, images of lung CT scans, excerpts from Walter Ong’s and Slavoj Zizek’s work on voice and orality, documentational footage of a tape loop installation Pacific March (2022), among others, in order to reflect on the relation between literacy and orality in the limit cases of mass violence, where the veracity of verbal testimonies, as opposed to written records, is being contested.

Single-channel video with 3-channel audio
Duration: 15 min.

“Pacific March” is an English translation of Taiheiyō kōshinkyoku, a Japanese military march song composed by Fuse Hajime in 1939. I transcribed the version sung by Joseph "Kanaka/Tanaka," a Papua New Guinea native who experienced the Japanese occupation during WWII as a young boy, which was featured in Sekiguchi Noriko's 1989 documentary Senso Daughters. I then had a performer play the first verse of the transcribed melody on piano and recorded it on a 10-second cassette tape loop. The loop is wound around a stainless bucket heated at 60 degrees Celsius, the temperature for "baking" old tapes in a condition known as sticky-shed syndrome. The choice of this setup derives from the fact that Kawata Fumiko, a Japanese journalist, used over hundreds of cassette tapes for interviewing Pae Pong-gi, who had inadvertently revealed for the first time the existence of wartime "comfort women" in 1971. Although the content of the tapes were later transcribed and edited to a book version, A House with Red-tiled Roof, the tapes themselves, which contain Pae's voice, remain in Kawata's abode, most of which would probably be suffering from sticky-shed syndrom by now.

Installation with cassette tape, cassette tape player, electric stove, stainless bucket with water, and timer
Dimensions variable

Indexical Constellations
2021

Indexical Constellations addresses the abuse of detained asylum seekers in South Korea in September 2021, where a detainee was hog-tied for over four hours at one of the immigrant detention centers. The performance is reading of a transcribed version of the statement issued by the detainee after the incident, which was delivered by an activist supporting him at a press conference.
The vibration of the performer's voice is captured beneath the vocal cord by a band of piezo-electric transducers she is wearing, which at first it goes through a series of modifications via granular synthesis. The granular effect gradually wears out as the performance proceeds, and in the end the audience is left with only the vibrational trace of the performer's voice—its speech content is gone, whereas the prosodic elements remain. The sound interacts with the audio-responsive visual generated by a Max patch that responds by creating lines—whose threshold is determined based on the amplitude—on a point-cloud image of the sites where the very first refugee camps in South Korea were established (1975). The entire project is based on a year-long fieldwork that consists of such site visits, interviews with an asylum seeker on a temporary release, and the activities of International Waters 31, a group of activists formed in response to the abuse of detainees at Hwaseong Immigrant Detention Center.

Audio-visual performance
Duration: approx. 55 min.
Premiered at Theatre Sinchon (Seoul, KR)

Dates: Sunday, Dec. 5 – Saturday, Dec. 11, 2021

Credits:

Created by Da Eun Lee and Hangil Jang
Video: Da Eun Lee (right), Hangil Jang (left)
Sound: Hangil Jang
Reciter: Hyunjin Kim
Dramaturg: Jae Wook Song
Technical Assistance: duruphil
Written Descriptions: Minkwan Kim
Documentation: Da Eun Lee, Yohan Choi
Sponsored by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture
Special Thanks to Yamoudou Traore and Minkwan Kim