Seoul, South Korea, 24 NOV '23
Concrete Beach (2023) is a site-specific mixed-media and sound installation presented as part of a city-wide public art event organized by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture’s Street Arts Creation Center. Designed as a playful intervention into the existing urban matrix, the work transforms a mundane corner of the city into a temporary perceptual landscape where sound and spatial form seamlessly converge.
The work creates an artificial shore unexpectedly dropped into the middle of a parking lot, surrounded by dense concrete skyscrapers and parked cars in central Seoul. Stepping outside the safe boundaries of a gallery, this surreal interlude in Bukchang-dong catches passing pedestrians off guard. Lying back on a beach chair and putting on headphones, one hears what initially sounds like gentle ocean waves. In reality, it is the sound of mixing liquid concrete—a material born from sand—interwoven with intimate conversations about art.
Rather than asking the viewer to passively observe an artwork, Concrete Beach invites them to lie down and surrender to these synthetic waves. It operates as a fleeting condition of imagination—a subtle, auditory crack in the city’s rigid surface that playfully transforms how we perceive the gray world around us.