Mi(x)ing Zone-Voice Prisms | 2025
A duo exhibition of Ian Kang & Yun Lee
Curated by Yuwen Huang (E-von)
Date
Jul 18, 2025–Aug 10, 2025
Location
OH Art Foundation,
3/F Zhou B Art Center,
1029 W 35TH ST,
CHICAGO, IL 60609
Link
https://www.ohartfoundation.org/mixingzonevoiceprisms
https://thevisualist.org/2025/07/mixing-zone-voice-prisms/
https://rhizome.org/community/53712/
Curatorial Statement / Artworks Description / About the artists / Documentation
Curatorial Statement
Mi(x)ing Zone – Voice Prisms presents the recent collaborative practice of interdisciplinary artists Ian Kang and Yun Lee within an immersive environment of sound, projection, and light. The show features AI-generated voices in multiple languages, spatialized audio, interactive sound installations, and experimental videos. Through a layered sensory experience, we invite visitors into a shared space where spinning disco balls serve as prisms that refract the tension between migrants' memories and the conventional framework of the American Dream.
Based in Chicago and sharing Taiwanese heritage, Ian and Yun are closely engaged with how diasporic life continues to evolve in today’s interconnected cultural landscape. At the center of the installation, the disco balls, symbols of multicultural nightlife, are reimagined as subtle acts of resistance against suburban uniformity. With AI serving as a critical lens, while simulating different cultural voices, its algorithmic cadence ends up reinforcing the homogeneity it supposedly critiques. Through the fusion and collision of different media, it uncovers a version of “multiculturalism” that is preserved only within a standardized American lifestyle.
Working across diverse media, the artists construct an open narrative that bridges the virtual and physical realms. Audiences are encouraged to both imagine multilingual coexistence within a monolingual context, while observing how migrant families' speech patterns unconsciously mirror the suburban uniformity that underpins the American Dream's domestic ideal. In this space of echoing voices and prismatic light, the American Dream shatters into a thousand refracted possibilities. We invite you to explore the embedded tensions and find fresh insights within the work's critical framework.
Welcome to experience this multi-sensory journey in Mi(x)ing Zone - Voice Prisms.
-Yuwen Huang (E-von)
Artworks Description
American Dream Reflector (2025)
Immersive real-time installation
Dimensions variable
A collaboration project by Ian Kang & Yun Lee
American Dream Reflector is an immersive installation that explores the subtle rhythms and uncanny uniformity of suburban life across diverse communities. The work includes three parts: a video installation, a virtual sound spatial audio system and an interactive music system.
In the video installation, real footage of libraries in Skokie, Schaumburg, and Naperville is juxtaposed with simulated landscapes from Google Earth, revealing the mechanical repetition and shared ideals behind the American Dream. Projected onto a rooftop-shaped screen, the imagery blends with disco lighting and suburban signage, turning the mirror ball into a metaphor for the allure and emptiness of suburban aspiration.
The surrounding soundscape is generated in real time by a multilingual large language model (LLM), and is set within a 24-hour cycle. These AI-produced suburban voices, segmented by the hour, reveal the biases of algorithmic storytelling and raise questions about whether the pursuit of the American Dream has become overly rigid and standardized.
To invite human intervention, visitors can pick up an Xbox controller to manipulate the voices and sound in real time, briefly disrupting the machine-driven environment. This moment of human intervention plays out in a fog-filled space surrounded by 13 spinning disco balls, creating a surreal, dreamlike setting.
Ultimately, the work poses a double question. It explores how the American Dream has fractured within contemporary suburban life and how machine-driven systems may soon recreate it as a hollow simulation. Visitors are invited to consider whether they are experiencing the fulfilment of a utopia or are trapped in an algorithmic dystopia disguised as progress.
Special Thanks
Joanna Chang, Lillie Chung, Jason Hsu, Weiyun Szu, Techuan Tan
About the artists
Ian Kang
b. 1997, Chicago, IL; lives in Chicago, IL
https://chicagoiankang.wixsite.com/mysite
Ian Kang is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. His work explores the entanglements between digital technology, human perception, and diasporic identity. Through 3D animation, real-time audiovisual performances, and experimental video, he constructs systems that examine how algorithmic tools reshape memory, language, and cultural narratives. Drawing from glitch aesthetics, AI-generated content, and cross-cultural dislocation, he approaches technology not as a symbol of linear progress, but as a contested terrain shaped by history, power, and possibility. By weaving together obsolete media, voice synthesis, and real-time computation, he creates temporal collisions that resist dominant narratives of innovation. His work envisions a techno-cultural commons where past and future tools—VHS artifacts, AI models, analog noise—interact in mutual disruption and reinvention. Rather than reproducing hegemonic systems of control, his practice seeks to open cracks within them, proposing an alternate imagination of co-existence between humans and machines rooted in fragmentation, multiplicity, and shared agency.
Lee Yun
b. 1998, Taiwan, China; lives in Chicago, IL
https://www.leeyuntw.com/
Lee Yun (b. 1998, Taiwan) is a media artist whose work explores the translation of figures and gestures in moving images to interrogate time, memory, and identity. Using film, video, installation, and real-time audiovisual systems, Yun examines how gestures are preserved, fractured, and reconfigured across temporal, cultural, and spatial landscapes. Cultural depiction in Yun’s practice is fluid, shaped by traces, reflections, and ephemeral presences. Drawing from phenomenology and postcolonial discourse, they explore moving images as both personal and collective memory, questioning the authority of representation and embracing the ambiguities of identity. Rooted in an expanded approach to editing, Yun treats cuts as rhythmic disruptions and images as spectral artifacts, dissolving linear time to reconstruct figures in a state of flux. Through a poetic lens, Yun’s work reimagines time as echoes and disruptions, constructing spaces where figures exist in perpetual translation, unbound from the structures that seek to define them.
