Konhee is a rising senior majoring in Visual Studies and Economics and minoring in Fine Arts. He is intrigued by the intersection of visual art and music. At Penn, he was engaged in both art and research projects that explored the relationships between the two art forms. In his most recent art project, Konhee used videos that he shot in the Appalachian Mountains and the sounds from Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring to study how a sense of space can be conveyed in through images and sounds.


Sound and Image Digital Museum

Konhee's project at the Price Lab integrates his interest in the visual art and music with curation. He is working to create a digital museum that organizes visual artworks according to the sounds they are associated with. Visitors to the museum will navigate through different artworks using sounds. There are various connections that can be drawn between visual art and music. Monet’s cliff paintings and Debussy’s La Mer may be associated together for their impressionist style. Pollock’s abstract expressionist paintings may share similar ideas of chance used in John Cage’s music. Works by artists and composers such as Wassily Kandinsky and Olivier Messiaen who had image-sound synesthesia—the experience of seeing images when hearing sounds or vice versa—also provide important insight into the connections between visual art and music. The objective of the digital museum project is to understand some of the complex relationships between the two art forms.