Listening to the City Through a Cat’s Senses: 'Universal You' Exhibition

[Financial News]  Cities constantly generate sound, from the noise of passing cars and leaves rustling in the wind to the sound of flowing water and mechanical hums. Yet familiar ambient sounds are often pushed aside as meaningless background, while frequencies beyond human hearing and traces of small beings are even more easily erased.A participatory sound exhibition that listens to the city through the senses of another being, beyond the human ear, is being held in Nowon District in northern Seoul. The Seoul Museum of Art said on the 23rd that it will present the 2026 idle-space project 'Universal You-Shim Ida-eun' at Lounge 2 and 3 of Seoul Museum of Art’s Buk-Seoul Museum of Art through April 11 next year.
Featuring sound artist Shim Ida-eun, the exhibition consists of three works: a sound installation, a real-time video piece and an interactive work. Born in 1995, Shim has walked field sites following the traces of wildlife and endangered species, collecting sounds and exploring what lies beyond the human-centered boundaries of hearing.
The exhibition reinterprets the 'Universal' series, which had previously centered on outdoor field trips and performances, for a museum setting for the first time. Real-time audio streaming devices have been installed at several locations around the museum, and visitors are designed to directly move structures and intervene in the ambient sounds outside.
The exhibition title, 'Universal You,' places two seemingly incompatible concepts side by side. 'Universal' refers to general conditions that hold true in any situation, while 'you' points to a single being with a unique body and senses. Through this paradoxical pairing, the artist asks whose standards of perception have been treated as universal.
At the center of the exhibition is an imaginary figure known as 'Cat A.' Cat A is set up as a being that roams around the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art and senses the sounds of the Nowon District area, including Madeul Sangsang Playground, Jungnangcheon and Seoul National University of Science and Technology (SeoulTech). Through the cat’s perspective and hearing, the artist brings into the gallery the ambient sounds and traces of small beings in the city that humans often overlook.
The representative work 'Universal You,' installed in Lounge 3, is a large-scale sound installation in which visitors turn a handle to create sound. Ambient sounds collected around the museum are transmitted into the exhibition space, and when visitors turn the handle on the circular wooden structure, the creaking of wooden gears and the friction of fabric are added.
The ambient sounds from outside and the sounds produced by the structure are combined to create a new auditory landscape. Visitors do not simply listen to the finished sound; they become participants who change the work’s sound through their own movements.
The work converts ultrasonic frequencies that cats can detect into sounds humans can hear. By transforming sounds that existed beyond the human audible range into something perceptible, it proposes a new way of listening outside a human-centered auditory system.
Yellow and light-green embroidered symbols are stitched onto the webbing fabric of the structure. These symbols visually translate the sounds collected by the artist, using colors that cats can recognize relatively clearly. By organizing not only sound but also color and movement around feline senses, the work turns a familiar city into a strange new world.
In 'Field Tracker,' a circular screen work installed on the ceiling of Lounge 2, the movements of visitors and Cat A overlap in real time. The screen shows overhead footage of visitors turning the handle in Lounge 3 alongside a fictional route that assumes Cat A moved about 3.5 kilometers around the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art.
The cat’s route is continuously generated in dotted lines in response to real-time sound data flowing into the exhibition. As visitors turn the handle, the route changes organically. Through the moment when their own paths and the cat’s trajectory overlap on the screen, visitors intuitively experience how different beings share the same urban space.
'Universal Forest,' installed in the center of the exhibition space, features a 16-sided wooden structure stacked with 72 drawers. The drawers contain natural objects such as fallen leaves, fruit, moss and stones, suggesting a day in the life of Cat A. The contents are refreshed throughout the exhibition period to reflect the changing seasons.
Inside the structure, sounds collected by the artist in and around Nowon District play softly. A separate table holds drawers containing an unfinished short story, and when visitors find the drawer with the number corresponding to a blank in the story and place it back in the right spot, the incomplete narrative gradually comes together.
By opening the drawers and touching the natural objects, visitors imagine the soil, riverbanks, forests and streets that Cat A may have passed through. As sound, touch, movement and storytelling come together, the life of a being that is rarely visible in the city is revealed in fuller dimension.
Director Choi Eun-joo of the Seoul Museum of Art said, "This exhibition offers an experience of listening to the sounds of beings we often pass by without noticing in our daily lives," adding, "We hope the process of making and hearing sound will become a time of connection with a world beyond humans."
[email protected] Yoo Seon-jun Reporter