D.C. is lousy with immersive or high-tech art experiences, but the newly opened “Korea: Cubically Imagined” at the Korean Cultural Center in Northwest D.C. sets itself a party by bringing 15 different digital works to one place. The exhibit features some of the most popular Korean pop culture exports, as well as works by lesser known digital artists or remixed visions of the country’s traditional painting.
Together, the pieces highlight the country as an emerging creative force on the global stage, as well as a technological powerhouse. The sprawling, tech-savvy exhibit highlighting the various Korean art forms has already traveled to Paris, Hong Kong, and New York, and now arrives in D.C.
“D.C. is a mixture of politics, culture, society, and international embassies,” says Hungu Lee, a project manager for the Korean Cultural Center. “We think it’s a great chance for all these groups to experience cutting edge cultural and artistic content.”
Two of the country’s blockbuster pop culture offerings get a second life in this showcase: a K-pop band BTS with a virtual concert, and a virtual reality movie that brings viewers into the settings of the award-winning movie Parasite.
The BTS concert was originally filmed and streamed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the large cube they performed in has been recreated virtually. When visitors don headsets, they get a 360 view of the cube stage floating in space, and can seemingly get in the performer’s faces.
“The fans can actually dive into the concert through the VR work,” says Somi Hong, president of exhibition partner Artplace.
For the Parasite work, VR workshop EVR Studio got permission from the film’s director, Bong Joon-ho, to create an extended reality piece that takes viewers through scenes from the beloved film. Hong says that it expands on the world of the film by “[unraveling] hidden spaces and metaphors of the movie in a surreal visual language.” Looking through VR glasses and listening to a headset, the viewer seems to float down staircases and over mountains, and the wooden floors and glass windows of the mansion set splinter apart and fly past.
Other pieces may be less well known, but no less engrossing. A video-game-inspired piece by ROOMTONE uses VR headsets and handheld controllers so visitors can interact with virtual objects and participate in a mystery story by piecing together information conveyed in bits of dialogue.
These pieces get their own standalone sections. The rest of the works play on a loop that runs about an hour long inside a room with mirrored walls that gives the feeling of being surrounded by the visuals. An animation by the group Design Silver Fish boasts colorful augmented reality apparitions of household gods, who in Korean lore watch over a family’s home. Two pieces by the group d’strict transports visitors to lush gardens and jungles through projection mapping visuals and accompanying sound.
The exhibit offers some background into traditional Korean art as well. The National Museum of Korea opened multiple galleries dedicated to immersive digital art in 2020 to bring classic Korean paintings to life, and two of these installations are featured in this exhibit. “Climbing Mt. Geumgang” by Jeon Seon and “Royal Procession with the People”— based on a series of visual records from the Joseon Dynasty — are some of the best known paintings in Korea, but largely unfamiliar to Western audiences. Another piece by the group EASYWITH similarly blows ups and dramatizes classic Korean landscape paintings, letting them be considered in new ways.
Hong points out that this kind of immersive presentation lets people linger with the artwork, in contrast to a regular museum experience. “This immersive experience runs about ten minutes for each work, while what average visitors spend in front of a historical artifact is just a few seconds long,” she says.
“Korea: Cubically Imagined” is free to visit, but timed passes must be reserved ahead of time. The exhibit runs from May 27-June 9, and is open daily from 10am to 7pm (closed 1-2pm).
