Eastern Resonance, 3rd Harmonic: HWI feature

Eastern Resonance, 3rd Harmonic: HWI

by ESS Curatorial Fellow James Gui

Leading up to Eastern Resonance, the October 30 Quarantine Concert featuring experimental pop and club musicians from Asia and the diaspora, Curatorial Fellow James Gui sat down with each of the performers to get an idea of their background and thought process behind their music. Here, we introduce Hwi Hwang, a Korean audiovisual artist who releases music as HWI and participates in an artist collective called eobchae.

Thanks to DJ Ditto for providing some translations

Hwi Hwang is an artist that defies categorization. Her music (released under the mononym HWI) combines sweeping, idiosyncratic electronic noise with her own heavily-processed vocals, but she resists the label of “electronic musician”. She’s also not too keen on “so-called experimental music.” As she describes it, “experiment for experiment’s sake is paradoxically boring. I just try to find interesting sounds and put them together on the sequencer until they start to sound interesting altogether.” When she started out making music, she picked up a DAW simply because she couldn’t play any instruments. But the imaginative textures she constructs in her music along with the deeply conceptual nature of her work belie her seemingly casual origin story.

She’s one-third of 업체 eobchae, an audiovisual art collective consisting of herself, Nahee Kim, and Cheonseok Oh. Eobchae, which translates to “company” in Korean, produces work that critiques modernity by imagining systems of a near, dystopian future. In 2021, they released The Decider’s Chamber, a concept album written by Hwang in conversation with Kim’s “Daddy Residency” project. 

“The Decider’s Chamber stemmed from a series of speculative fiction projects of eobchae, which proposes the awry prospect of our near future,” Hwang describes. This future is one in which AI-based software obviates the need for men in human reproduction. “The Decider narrative depicts two possible worlds where ‘Hopebabies’ and ‘Despairbabies’ are our descendants. Both of them are quite bleak,” she explains.

Hwang is also a visual artist. Her process for sonic and visual art is much the same, however. “I make a new project file, import sources(.wav, .jpg, .mov, .obj, etc...), adjust parameters, Ctrl+c, v, z, repeat and export the final product,” she reveals over e-mail. With this elegant workflow, she’s directed and edited her own music videos in addition to producing 3D graphics for fellow musician KATIE.

Comparisons to Björk might be apt, and while Hwang does indeed enjoy her music’s timelessness, I’d like to caution against falling for the trap of using Western artists as a measuring stick to evaluate or demystify their non-Western counterparts. Rather, tune into her performance this Saturday and see for yourself why she’s an artist to watch in the coming years. Fans of karaoke will be especially entertained!