For Lampo, Jones has created a work inspired by the performance tradition of Korean pansori—a musical genre incorporating song, story, and gesture—and the sonic ritual practices of female Korean shamans (mudang).

a place where many people gather (soundings) is a polyvocal, multilayered work that considers how sound, heard in shared listening spaces, transforms listeners’ relationships to history, to each other, and to place. The work emerges from Jones’ improvisatory arrangements of field recordings, electronic noise, and manipulation of materials like metal, wood, glass, text, and voice.

Pansori is a compound of the Korean words pan 판 and sori 소리, the latter meaning “sound.” Pan is thought to refer either to a song with many tones or to a situation where many people gather, reflecting the format of the pansori performance, which usually lasted three to eight hours and took place in public, communal spaces. The pansori singer is an oral historian, carrying the past into the present through sound, gesture, and text.

Bonnie Han Jones (b.1977) is a Korean American improvising musician, poet, and educator working primarily with electronic sound and text. Her work is iterative, multidisciplinary, and typically involves building concepts through research and study and then moving these ideas through a variety of different mediums, methods, and forms. She uses electronic music, recorded sound materials, text, video, performance, and score with attention and focus on listening and improvisation as a core theme and generative method. The work broadly explores noise, sonic identity, listening as thinking, and sound as knowledge.

She performs both solo and in a wide range of collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Jones was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and has been a board member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, with Suzanne Thorpe, she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops focused on technology-based art making, improvisation, and community collaboration.

Jones has received commissions from the ICA, London, and the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, and has presented her work widely throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe, and Asia. She was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea, Jones was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, spent years in Baltimore and Providence, and is currently based in Chicago.

Jones last performed for Lampo in December 2022. She is also a Lampo Folio contributing artist.

Presented in partnership with the Graham Foundation