Academy – Seoul

Rain is a Festival – The Listening Academy at Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul

July 15 - 18, 2026

How rain is followed! How rain might be followed! 

Rain is a Festival is drawn from Thomas Merton’s Rain and the Rhinoceros (1965):

“Rain is a festival… The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the woods with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms. And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.”

Artists Law Yuk Mui (Tokyo/ Hong Kong), Joseph Lee (Hong Kong), and Lam Yip (Hong Kong) present a four-day workshop inside and in the vicinity of Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul to transform the participants’ personal experience of rain through different ways of engaging with the body—notating, mapping, listening, and collective walking. The workshop and its different explorations emphasize co-learning and co-creating, inviting participants to follow rain as both matter and meaning. Inner experiences and personal intuitions are given room to express themselves through forms that can be shared, sensed, felt, seen, and heard. Through this explorative arrangement, rain is positioned as a guide for learning new ways of sensing and moving as well as for attuning to the cyclical rhythms of water.

The Listening Academy is held as part of the final session of Leeum Museum of Art’s Idea Museum In the Middle Voice. It is developed and facilitated in collaboration with soundpocket, a Hong Kong-based art collective that supports artists working with listening. In a separate presentation, its founder Yang Yeung will share soundpocket’s current work as “experiments of joy”, inspired by Gabrielle Civil and her performance artists collective. These experiments show how soundpocket has moved with artists and has been moved by them, finding, losing and recovering our equipoise.