Matter as Composer, Artist as Listener

ISEA2025 Keynote Reflection

Every now and then, an artist speaks not to deliver a message,
but to tune the room to a different frequency.
This morning at ISEA2025, Yunchul Kim did exactly that.

His keynote wasn’t a performance.
It wasn’t a lecture.
It was a method of attention.
A slow unfolding of ideas, systems, poetics, and material behaviours —
woven together into what felt like a living ontology.

Matter Is Not a Medium — It Is a Mind in Motion
At the heart of Kim’s practice is a radical proposition:

Matter thinks.
It reacts. It responds. It shapes its surroundings.
And it co-creates the artwork.

He doesn’t use materials to express ideas.
He co-evolves with them — in fluid, in glass, in magnetism, in turbulence.
His installations don’t represent natural forces.
They enact them.

From flowing fluids guided by algorithms
to paramagnetic particles drawing through invisible fields,
Kim’s works are systems with agency.
They unfold in time, change with conditions, and resist containment.

Transmattering, Crossmorphing, Matterreality
These are not sci-fi neologisms.
They are necessary terms — born from the inadequacy of inherited language.

Kim coins:

Transmattering: mutual transformation between matter and system

Crossmorphing: forms that don’t stabilise, but overlap, glitch, melt

Matterreality: the world not as representation but as ongoing event

What he offers isn’t metaphor.
It’s an epistemology — one that sees everything as process, nothing as fixed.

In a world obsessed with clarity and control,
this is a radical repositioning of the artist, the material, the system, the studio.