September 2–November 27, 2022
“Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly. A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
Picture yourself at a museum in Seoul. It is the fall of 2022. In the open air, works of art appear. They are seen through the prism of your telephone: a dancing giant, flowers reading poetry, an artificial sun and a small cloud that hovers close to the ground.”
In collaboration with Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of Acute Art, Leeum Museum of Art (Leeum) and Hoam Museum of Art (Hoam) present Kaleidoscope Eyes, an augmented reality (AR) exhibition that will run from September 2 through November 27, 2018. The show displays a variety of AR pieces created by well-known modern artists from around the world against a backdrop of buildings and gardens designed by masters of traditional Korean landscape architecture. Through the manifestation of artists’ creative visions in virtual spaces, Kaleidoscope Eyes enables viewers to engage with and exchange art in novel ways.
Curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Artistic Director of Acute Art, a digital platform that has been producing and showcasing artworks that employ cutting-edge technologies, the exhibition presents 38 AR works by 16 artists, including Nina Chanel Abney, Darren Bader, Marco Brambilla, Julie Curtiss, Olafur Eliasson, Cao Fei, Ho Tzu Nyen, KAWS, Koo Jeong A, Alicja Kwade, Lee Bul, Lu Yang, Bjarne Melgaard, Precious Okoyomon, David Shrigley, Tomás Saraceno.
Kaleidoscope Eyes in Seoul also premieres Lee Bul’s new augmented reality work, Willing To Be Vulnerable—Metalized Balloon Ver. AR22 (2022), which was commissioned by Leeum for the exhibition. Previous editions of the exhibition were held in Beijing (2020), London (2021), New York (2021), and Singapore (2022), and they attracted widespread attention.
The exhibition will offer a chance to imagine a future of infinite possibilities and challenge our preconceptions of engaging with art by encouraging artists and viewers to cross the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds while interacting and communicating through the newest technological medium.
On September 3, Leeum will hold an occasion of presentations and a panel discussion called “New Media Talk” in conjunction with the exhibition. In this panel, Daniel Birnbaum, artistic director of Acute Art, Seongeun Kim, director of the Nam June Paik Art Center, Lauren Cornell, director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and Hyunsuk Seo, artist and professor at the Graduate School of Communication & Arts at Yonsei University, will each share their experiences working with new media and share their perspectives on how art is changing.
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum, Artistic Director of Acute Art
Leeum Museum of Art
60-16, Itaewon-ro, 55-gil, Yongsan-gu
140-893 Seoul
South Korea
T +82 2 2014 6900