A solo exhibition by Jenna Eun (은정아), who works as a pianist, singer-songwriter, and artist. Selected for the visual arts category of the 2026 Yeonsu Arts Support Program, the exhibition presents works of interactive sound art. The title “hearin’ inhere in here” means “hearing dwells here,” or “hearing is inherent.”

The central questions this project poses are: where is the boundary between noise and music, and has technology truly enhanced our experiences of listening and of creating?

The acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer once proposed the concept of the soundmark. Derived from “landmark,” the term describes how, just as a landmark visually represents a place, a soundmark audibly expresses the identity of a place or a community: the bell of a church tower that once told villagers the time, or the distinctive horn heard only at a particular harbor. In modern society, however, these communal experiences of listening together, of keeping our ears open and sensing the space and the beings around us with care, are falling apart.

In this city, machines, people, and nature are packed tightly together, each absorbed in crying out. As our ears grow weary, the line between noise and what is not noise fades, and the category of noise widens without mercy. The ways to cope with a loud world are to make yet more noise or to block our ears. Now that each of us can own a personal listening device (a TV, a radio, speakers, and now even headphones and earphones, which are hardly different from walls pressed against the skull), sounds and music of every kind have even been reduced to a means of defense in the noise-filled city: we listen “in order not to hear” other sounds.

Even musicians, who ought to awaken us to the wonder of sound, seem to have forgotten what sounds there are in the world. They too, hurrying to escape noise or worn down by noise complaints, shut their windows tight and plug their ears. Now that machines have entered this closed room of creation, the questions grow more complicated still. Machines, too, now judge between noise and music, and can even draw something out of disorder and make something of it. In this they seem to resemble us, and in being incomparably fast and smooth, at some point they may even seem better than us. Still, we can ask ourselves toward what, and for what, we listen and make. Or we might return to where that smoothness cannot reach: to improvisation, and to intended flaws.

Listeners and makers alike now stand together before that boundary. At a time when technology, stimuli, noise, and sound mingle and overflow, we ask what we are hearing, what we are not hearing, and what we ought to hear. (Yet all of this, in the end, can only be played through speakers and headphones, leaning once again on technology. May you leave this place and listen to more living things.)