Sound Cathedrals and Sacred Songs Bring Korean Identity to Life in Bora Yoon's New Performance

Tibetan singing bowls, piano hammers, cell phones, phonograph horns, bells, xylophones, cans, metronomes, metallic pickup sticks, a violin, and a vintage record player take their respective places on a small wooden stage. Off to the side, grandfather clock stands ready to chime. These are musician Bora Yoon’s instruments, whose clangs, clicks, whirs and whispers she braids with her own sonorous voice into soundscapes of the subconscious.

Premiering to the world at Prototype Festival in New York City, Yoon’s Sunken Cathedral is an audiovisual performance that unites the past seven years of her sonic mode of storytelling. “All the instruments and objects you see on stage have been selected in order to illuminate duality and double-meaning, often found in dream symbolism—that live in within the playful paradox, and binary of the mundane vs the magical,” the artist writes in the program.

This is the first time Yoon’s fragile sound architectures are realized exactly as the visual poetry she imagined them to be. The stage resembles a chamber from the past, brimming with things, and ever-expanding with its projected background, from Victorian wallpapering to galaxies of a million tiny starlights. It is simultaneously a spaceship, a time-travel machine, the diagram of a memory, and a corridor in Yoon’s mind.

Yoon carefully navigates the islands of instruments that are arranged on the floor, the table, and the walls as she tells her story. In the back corner, the grandfather clock is a literal and metaphorical door into the past: Yoon exits the stage, and Vong Pak, a traditional Korean drummer and dancer emerges in her wake. He steals the central object of the narrative, a gleaming crystal that Yoon left spinning on a record player, throwing its light against the walls. At other moments in the performance, Pak dances from behind the backdrop, casting a giant shadow or “blood memory” behind Yoon as she sings.

As the work unpeels its visual and auditory layering into realms of the divine and sacred, it remains consistently grounded in Yoon’s Korean-American identity and personal journey. Answering machine messages from her mother and the ghostly voice of her deceased father interrupt Yoon’s performances, their Korean dialogues becoming added threads in Yoon’s moving yarn. “Sunken Cathedral is haunted by the voices of a Korea past, present, and future. It explores blood memory and cultural identity,” the artist notes.

At the end of the story, Yoon finds a second, more lustrous crystal to replace the one she’s lost, hanging it inside of the grandfather clock and pulling the orbit of the performance through birth, life, death, and back to its starting point. Reborn in a blanket of lights, set decorations, and sounds, The Sunken Cathedral emerges.

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