Experiencing Virtual Reality

Experiencing Virtual Reality

Ahn Kwang-june is an artist who uses images from dreams as the main motif for his works. He talks about his dreams and a precarious boundary between reality and virtual reality through three-dimensional visual works and game art.

Unlike other conventional exhibitions, his unusual works require active participation from the audience, as they are obliged to wear specially designed glasses and use joysticks. With those glasses on, viewers can experience a surreal three-dimensional world in which dreamy images of Ahn's work pop out and move back and forth between reality and virtual reality.

"A dream does not unfold in an inactive screen but in endlessly changing movements. It is not restrained by space or time. Thus a flat canvas was not good enough for me to express everything I had in mind."

So he decided to use three-dimensional technology and a graphic software to recreate in detail the realm of dream, which was a temporary virtual reality. Instead of using traditional art tools such as pastel, acrylic and paint, he depends on clicks of a computer mouse and the insertion of numbers on a keyboard to express his world of dreams in vivid movements and colors.

His representative work ``Space Mirror Object 2006'' has given life to whirling atmosphere and spiral of rainbow-colored clouds. As units of such images move at fixed speed, they form a symmetry with each other, which leads viewers with glasses to feel as if they are being put into a state of hypnosis. A surrealist technique, decalcomania, can be witnessed while those images make movements in a certain pattern in the process of integration.

"Ahn is one of the rare artists who has been consistently working on discussing the matter of virtual reality. We expect that these surreal and unfamiliar images that are recreated through most state-of-the-art technology can pave the way for a new arena of media arts," said Hwang Jeong-in, a curator of the museum.