In a compact gallery a short walk from Seoul Station, a strand of light circles an oval room. Step into its path and the space answers with sound. Linger, and the tones you set off drift into the ones left by whoever crossed the beam before you, so that strangers end up in a chord none of them planned.
That work, Bak Yu-seok's "Cylinder Movement," sets the tone for "Media Sullae: When Technique Follows," the 2026 disability-and-technology exhibition organized by the Korea Disability Arts & Culture Center. The show opened July 16 and runs at Modu Art Space in central Seoul through Aug. 21, bringing together six artists and teams working in interactive installation, AI and kinetic robotics.
Kim You-suk's "Plant Robot" fills one wall with 40 robotic modules and an artificial sun. Sensors read the light around them, and the brighter it grows, the wider and faster the modules shake. Visitors are invited to hold up a phone flashlight and move it close. The cluster stirs around the glow.
Kwak Yo-han turned a stroke and its aftermath into his subject. His acrylic painting "Wave and Crush" pulls shapes apart and puts them back together in a new arrangement, standing in for a life knocked off its footing and slowly rebuilt. Two AI-generated short videos, "The Moment of Creation," were made from those same paintings.
Nearby, Park Eun-young's untitled installation suspends 40 clear spheres. As viewers approach, the spheres seem to wake, shifting the light and shadow across the whole room in real time. The closer you come, the more they behave like something alive.
The exhibition is at its sharpest where the senses it centers are not the standard ones. Eeyo, who is deaf, builds a structure of steel frame, canvas, a submotor and a speaker for "A Trace Thereafter." The motor drives the canvas until it rattles, and the friction throws fragments of sound around the room rather than from a single point. Iron powder gathers on the surface, thick in some passages and thinly scattered in others depending on the source that shook it. Left long enough, the metal discolors on its own. Sound here is not heard so much as felt, then translated into something to look at and touch.
The exhibition's performance piece, Park Sung-min's "Antigravity," turns the usual order of dance inside out. Rather than a body moving in obedience to music, the movements of a deaf dancer, Kang Hye-ra, generate the sound. The gesture comes first, and a string quartet and electronics arrive behind it.
Admission is free. Modu Art Space is open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Sundays and public holidays, through Aug. 21.
yoohong@heraldcorp.com