“When an instrument is touched or brushed, it produces sound; when people are touched or brushed, they meet and part. In all these moments, we sing.” 

We live in an era marked by unprecedented wars and tragedies. As trials surge like towering waves, we ask: upon which crest do we now stand? Yet even in the roughest seas, song does not sink. It rises instead, soaring into the sky, moving against the current of time to reach beyond. The will to heal what has been wounded and to reconnect—this is Dah-eun Sori (“the sound of touch”). Premiered at the 2018 Yeowoorak Festival, Meon Arirang was a project that revived songs of Arirang preserved a century ago at Humboldt University in Germany. These were the earnest, sorrowful voices once sung in a foreign land, within prisoner-of-war camps—records of lives forcibly altered, where loss was inevitable. This is Geu-eun Sori (“the sound of being drawn, or scarred”). Now, once again, we summon the songs of a hundred years past—beyond the wounds that remain etched—so that we may reach one another anew.