Reuben Son
latin son: sound, korean 손: hand
I’m a Korean-American artist and technologist based in New York City, working primarily with software, sound, and ceramics. My current practice centers on the poetics of air: as environment made audible, as a force upon language, and in the sonorous potentiality of ceramic vessels. Air is both material and metaphor; like meaning itself, it cannot exist in a vacuum. To pay attention to the air is to attend to the liminal, the relational, and the dynamic.
My work is rooted in a background in sound art, and in particular the act of listening itself as a generative space for aesthetic experience. I’ve been developing work around this through what I call “choreographies of listening.” In “After Orpheus” (2025), the exhibition visitor interacts with the sculpture by holding a paper cup. In the “Airs” (2025) poems, the reader moves the collection like the blowing wind.
Expanding this body of work, I’m currently developing a series of ceramic sculptures and text-based scores that activate the air through listening.
In addition to my solo practice, I’ve assisted the artists Eli Keszler, James Hoff, and Glenn Jones for projects at The Whitney Museum of American Art, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Eyebeam, and the London ICA, and the record labels PAN and Thrill Jockey.
I’m currently working as a mobile app developer at Slate, and previously led engineering for The Strategist at New York Magazine and was a researcher at the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology.
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