Haedong Lee
About
Haedong Lee, from South Korea—a country leading the way in gradual human extinction due to its severe population decline caused by the world’s lowest birth rates and highest suicide rates—argues that human extinction is the best alternative for the planet and all other species. Using Anthropocene by-products and various sounds, he aims to provoke nonlinear thinking about anthropocentrism through his speculatively restructured Sound Object/Sound Ecosystem.
He explores how sound has played a crucial role in humans becoming the top predator leading to the Anthropocene, examining its political and economic uses throughout history. Recently, inspired by cowbells—the sound shackles confining animals turned livestock—he has developed the “The Sound of Restriction” series.
He has studied and inherited shamanism, folk beliefs, rituals, ceremonies, and labour songs from various tribes and rooted cultures in West Africa, Asia, and Europe, and has learned to perform and create various sound objects. He has also been exploring answers to the origins of sound through collecting and structuring sound materials based on various in-depth experiences. Furthermore, he has been making sound objects using metal, wood, and various other by-products of the Anthropocene as materials, and has been actively engaged in interdisciplinary works such as sound performance, record, video, and installation.
Constructing a distinctive ‘Sound Ecosystem’ with sound objects he creates and electronic instruments, Haedong stimulates audiences emotionally and intellectually. His practice, grounded in asceticism and meditation, is based on the belief that “we are the only species evolved enough to consciously go extinct for the good of all life, or which needs to.”
Performance link
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‘Ecology of Death and Annihilation : A Ceremony for Things that Wither’
– Full length video
link : https://youtu.be/mF__JlB4wvk
– 1minute teaser version
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‘Ceremony for the Last Humanity’
– 6minute teaser version
- Exist, as an Object
– https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/exist-as-an-object/
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