Hwang Hyoduck

Hwang Hyoduck is an artist whose practice investigates the unstable thresholds of perception — where sensation emerges but resists capture, where images flicker before forming, and language fails to translate. His works begin not with clarity, but with the failure of the senses: a misfiring, a delay, a ghost signal. Rather than treating perception as a passive reception of external stimuli, Hwang approaches it as an active structure shaped by the body, media, technology, and environment. In his recent project The Head Matts 2025, he explores how the senses operate within fractured, contradictory, or obsolete systems. The installation features devices such as rotating mechanical arms, e-ink screens, lighting structures, glass tubes, and water circulation systems that function independently and asynchronously. They generate interference rather than coherence — sentences left unread, sounds barely audible, images that vanish as soon as they appear. Central to his interest is the notion that seemingly immaterial signals — radio waves, data, cosmic noise — are inseparable from material substances. Using elements like copper, silicone, carbon, and sulfur, his works do not serve a fixed function, but instead hold traces of sensory processes, afterimages, and the ephemeral conditions in which meaning fails to arrive but sensation remains. Referencing the Voyager spacecraft and its long-lost signals as a conceptual departure point, Hwang’s work suspends itself in a state of waiting — for a message that may never come, yet shapes the space of its absence. In this way, his practice becomes less about presenting completed meanings and more about cultivating a field of resonance, in which memory, technology, and material trace the fragile contours of perception itself.