Joon Kwak (KP)

Joon Kwak is a Seoul-based sound director, designer, DJ and cultural producer working across electronic music, spatial audio, performance and experience design. Educated at Design Academy Eindhoven and formerly an intern at Amsterdam's STEIM, he originated the concept for Odio, the spatial-audio app that received the 2022 Apple Design Award for Innovation. His practice demonstrates how sound can function as identity, narrative and spatial material: he led the music direction for Seoul Light DDP 2025, created an interactive surround-sound environment for Bang & Olufsen, and composed and performed live modular scores for SONGZIO at Paris Fashion Week. His wider portfolio includes projects for MMCA, Frieze Seoul, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton and Samsung x Thom Browne. As a resident DJ at Faust, he has performed across Asia and Europe, including UMF Korea and Japan, EDC Korea, Dutch Design Weekand a European tour with Faust.

At the centre of Kwak's practice is a commitment to building cultural infrastructure from within Korea. Through PERMIT, the artist collective and cultural platform he founded and directs, he activates overlooked and unconventional locations - from former military and industrial sites to a traditional hanok, Seoul National University's Power Plant and Seoul's Oil Tank Culture Park - bringing club music into dialogue with visual art, movement, installation and spatial design. Collaborations with WeSA and Taiwan's Organik Festival connect Seoul's local scene to a wider East Asian network. Kwak also served as the South Korean representative of Techno Diplomacy, the cultural-exchange program initiated by the German Embassy in Seoul. Through a government-supported exchange in Berlin and Cologne, as well as club nights, workshops, installations and public discussions in Korea, the program explores techno as a vehicle for tolerance, creative freedom, community and urban regeneration. This work now extends beyond Seoul through PERMIT's collaboration with Goseong County and the German Embassy on SUNNFestival, which seeks to develop a sustainable cultural ecosystem with local creators in a region shaped by the Korean Demilitarized Zone.

One of the clearest expressions of Kwak's approach is ceiling service, the site-responsive listening series he founded in Seoul in 2024 and develops together with Dutch cellist and composer Maarten Vos. Across eleven editions, ceiling service has transformed a disused building in Yaksu-dong, the 25-metre planetarium dome at the Gwacheon National Science Museum, theatres, former industrial spaces and a ferry moored on the Han River. During multi-hour sessions, audiences lie on mattresses and are free to listen, read, draw, move, sleep, leave or return while ambient and experimental performances, spatial sound, responsive light, scent, tea and architecture unfold as a continuous environment. Rather than treating rest as wellness or prescribing a correct form of attention, ceiling service gives each listener the autonomy to edit their own time. With a presentation at Berlin's Reethaus in October 2026, the project is developing from a Seoul-based experiment into an international curatorial platform - one in which architecture becomes an instrument, artists construct immersive sonic worlds, and collective listening offers another way of inhabiting the city.