Insight Trip  _____  Interactive Art Museum in Gapyeong

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Interactive Art Meeting With IT

On the back of many recent advances in technology, a variety of interactive arts that combine IT and art are being actively presented. Traditionally, it was considered inappropriate to touch art or to make too much noise when you are viewing it. Interactive art, however, cannot be fully appreciated if the audience is just watching it passively. Gapyeong Interactive Art Museum is the world's first interactive art-exclusive gallery dedicated solely to 'Interactive Art'. In the Museum, visitors can freely move around, touch the work, move their body, and make sounds to complete the art pieces in display. Let's dive into the world of art and artworks completed by the participation of the viewer.

Feel, Experience, and Complete Art Yourself

Gapyeong Interactive Art Museum is the world's first 'interactive art' museum,
having opened in July 2016 after three years of preparation.
In interactive art, the artist creates work that responds to a specific touch or movement,
so that the viewers can complete the work through vigorous interaction with the piece.
In front of the red brick building, a variety of sculptures can be seen on the grassy lawn.
This is a sculpture park where artworks created by famous Korean artists are on display.
Before enjoying interactive art in earnest, you can feel the performance, curves,
and form of beauty conveyed by the sculptures in the front yard first.

Interactive Art Museum aims to be a museum that communicates and breathes with the audience.
In other words, it believes that the main character in art is not the art pieces, but the viewers who experience them.
Visitors roam around the museum, touch the works, and make sounds and move to experience the art at a personal level.

The first work that welcomes the audience is ‘Chaos Fractal’,
where the universe is expressed by light of various colors in a dark space.
The light and the pattern in mirrors attached on walls that face each other are constantly connected
and create an infinite universe.
This work responds to a variety of sounds, including voices and clapping.

‘Living Art’ Gaining Vitality through Movement

You can now move on to the next work after exploring the ever-repeating universe that responds to your voice.
There is water in a large dish.
When you take a step closer, you realize it is a video that makes it look like real water.
In this work, visitors see the scene of changing seasons and a stranger on images projected onto the dish.
There is an interesting episode about this work: when it was on display at one hotel, a puppy apparently tried to drink water from the dish.

Now, let’s look at the artwork that responds to movements.
As the visitor makes gestures in front of loudspeakers arranged in two circles, various lines continually appear,
representing sound waves with the sound of a soft bell ringing in the background.
It is as if many ideas and thoughts that exist in the world meet, fuse, and harmonize with one another.

On the second floor there is a stop motion animation called ‘Zoetrope’ on display.
In this work, skull-shaped people are constantly connected,
and when you turn on the work, the people constantly turn in a concentric circle.
This can be interpreted as the repetition of the constancy of life,
where humans are born and then returned to the earth by death, or the endless routine of our modern lives.
Mr. Dae Yang Park, Director of the Museum, provides the visitors with more diverse and interesting interpretations of the works.

Another work mimics the function of the iris and movement of the eye.
Each circle may be an iris, or the circles can form a large eye.
The next work gives you an opportunity to be a movie star.
Depending on your pace in a black and white video, your image in the video is also expressed in slow motion or fast speed.
In the next room, a projector slowly circles and records the visitor.
You can see yourself in this piece. This kind of experience can only be felt here at Interactive Art Museum.

A Story Completed By Audience

Here at Interactive Art Museum, visitors can make their own stories.
'Augmented Shadow' is a work where visitors create a shadow by moving a square box on the table.
Each cube creates a shadowed house, with trees, birds, and people around it.
A person takes a round light from a box and shines it on another house.
Here, light can be interpreted as energy or hope that brightens a space.
It is a moment when a creative idea is expressed through the experience of the work.

There is a woman's face on the screen.
The face of a woman conveys an expression depending on comments written on the Internet in real time
If the comment on the internet is positive, the woman smiles, and if there are more negative comments
than positive ones, the woman’s face becomes more and more depressed.
Sadly, visitors can hardly see a smile on her face these days.
In addition, a variety of light mediated works await the audience.
Artwork that changes its color when a person touches it, projects various images to an object in the form of a wooden bottle,
and uses LED on a horse-shaped sculpture show us that anything can be used for art and anyone can be a part of interactive art.

There is also a trick art section where people can get more engaged in famous paintings.
A total of 11 trick art pieces are exhibited here, and they are the work of a renowned artist
who painted the 11 paintings during two and a half years.
The works painted on a large canvas are installed on the wall, giving a feeling that they are painted directly onto the wall of the museum.

As the first attempt to transform a static place of art into a dynamic space
where the art communicates directly with the audience, Interactive Art Museum is expanding the significance
and space of art, and pursuing the ambitious dream of creating a ‘Korean Wave in Art’.
Come and experience the vibrant and colorful world of art at Interactive Art Museum.