A sound comes from afar. I ask, what is that sound? Sounds crashing into one another. I pause for a moment beneath the elevated railway, then make my way to the exhibition space. I once thought old landscapes gave way to the new, but perhaps not here. You don’t have to have lived through a time to be drawn to it. And if you ask why, not every answer comes with a reason. As the past and present collide, we are carried into the future. I’ve long moved with this flow. Like an assemblage—keeping the past alive, patching together the now, moving to a fast, agile beat. Time feels lightly scattered here. The histories of modernization, colonialism, and rapid economic growth are not bound by a linear narrative. One meets another, and together they move time forward. Somewhere in between, something else slips in.
Collision is a phenomenon in which one thing strikes another. What remains after a collision is debris. Upon seeing the remains, one might assume that two things collided. However, collision does not refer to things crashing into one another. In fact, it marks the intersection of temporalities. It could be something from one direction meeting something else approaching from the other side; two things travelling side by side until one suddenly swerves; or trajectories moving at an angle, eventually converging. Collision takes place when divergent temporalities intersect. This is not limited to major events or accidents. It can be found in the light, subtle ruptures of the present. In a state where neither fully overtakes the other, the collision stirs a perceptual frequency before any deeper contemplation sets in. How might this resonance between the artist and the audience unfold in the exhibition <crash!>?
<crash!> is an exhibition by Soyoung Kim and Jon E Price that explores the tensions and frictions emerging at the intersections of urban temporality, industry, and systems through works that engage with signs collected from everyday life, the repetitive rhythms of the city, and the standardized image shaped by industrial environments. Soyoung Kim pixelates collected clips from everyday life into repetitive patterns. Jon E Price begins with sound recordings of printing machines in the print alleys of Chungmuro, weaving the area's historical significance as the birthplace of Korean cinema into a cinematic work using projected film photography and sound. In Soyoung Kim’s work, collision evokes a sense of slippage. Her exhibited work <Harder!>(2025) presents images at the angle where an electric fan halts. The suspended moment suggests rest, yet the pixelated images continue relentlessly. The so-called “in-between time,” meant for rest, is co-opted into labor by a system that values efficiency above all. A similar logic unfolds in the work <#00FF00>(2024), which streams images captured with a night vision camera. With a title referencing the hexadecimal code for 100% green, the work portrays a society where security, safety, and eco-friendliness are reframed as efficiency through the gaze of a spectator.
In Jon E Price’s work, fragmented and disjointed images serve as sensory threads that lead us back to the past. <Machine Suite>(2025) is composed of 35mm slide projections and sound recorded by the artist. When fragmented gestures intertwine the origins of cinema with the traces of industrial labor, the viewer’s perception forms a composite of past and present. Furthermore, the past and present the artist encountered in Korea find a continuation in Southampton, another industrial city where he once lived in. In the works of Soyoung Kim and Jon E Price, fragmented visual and auditory images neither evoke a nostalgic past nor emphasize a sense of disconnection from the present. Rather, they mark encounters between distinct temporal and spatial axes. <crash!> invites us to observe the moments of slippage and transformation amid technological advancement and the replacement of labor—reminding us that friction was always present beneath the surface. Visual and auditory scenes and sounds that exist beyond language bring vibration and amplitude into the present. Repetitive rhythms refuse to stay within the temporal and spatial dimensions of labor, both past and present. Rather, they leap out or bounce off them. Visual and auditory debris reaches us from afar. They overlap past and present, human and machine, play and labor.