Wonyoung Shim is an interdisciplinary artist based in London and Seoul, working across installation, sculpture and sound. Her practice begins with subtle dissonances in everyday perception. Disappearing sounds, sudden dizziness, and an unaccountable sense of tension render familiar environments strange, revealing the gap between sensation and cognition. She treats these disruptions not as confusion, but as catalysts that open up renewed ways of perceiving.
Distorted sounds, fragmented spatial structures, and interrupted pathways are used to momentarily unsettle and reconfigure the viewer’s perceptual framework. These moments of disorientation accumulate into layered sensory experiences, where overlapping images and sensations expand the dimensions of perception. Her work is not simply the translation of experience into objects, but an attempt to give shape to sensations that resist form and visualising experiences that have previously gone unrecognised.
In her recent work, Shim has expanded her research to include cymatics — visual patterns generated by sound frequencies — as a means of making structural behaviour of sound perceptible and revealing the thresholds of perception. Through this, she explores the relationship between sound and form, and investigates how frequency shapes both physical space and the act of perceiving.