Hayoun Kwon (b. 1981) explores the possibilities of new media technologies, presenting a variety of video works based on animation, 3D, and virtual reality (VR). Her work often deals with stories that exist beyond recorded history, such as inaccessible places, memories that live only in the mind, or events that have gone undocumented.

By constructing virtual spaces through media technologies, the artist invites audiences into unexperienced worlds, expanding them into new shared memories.

Hayoun Kwon’s early works primarily explore themes of identity and boundaries. For instance, she focuses on the boundaries between collective and personal memories surrounding recorded history, as well as identities that cannot be fully narrated or represented.

One example is her 2011 work Lack of evidence, which reconstructs the childhood memories of Oscar, a Nigerian who sought asylum in France, through animation. Oscar, the protagonist of the video, recounts his experiences to seek asylum in France. However, the French government is reluctant to believe his story, as it exists solely in his memory and lacks concrete evidence.

The artist reimagines Oscar’s unclear memories, which cannot be substantiated, and visualizes his journey through 3D animation. This animation is overlaid with a drawing of Oscar’s escape route, created by himself. In doing so, Kwon places memories and experiences that never materialized into reality at the boundary between reality and fiction, documenting them as a fictional documentary shaped by the artist’s subjective interpretation.

The 2014 video work Model Village presents a fictional world that reimagines the North Korean propaganda village, Kijong-dong, through the artist’s imagination. During the production of this piece, Kwon sought permission for two years to film the Kijong-dong village located near Kaesong, North Korea, from the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). However, her requests were ultimately denied.

As a result, the artist chose to portray Kijong-dong—a real yet inaccessible place that can only be approached through imagination—as a fictional space resembling a film set rather than an actual village.

In Model Village, Kijong-dong, as an imagined image, is constructed with transparent models. These transparent houses appear and disappear repeatedly depending on the intensity of the lighting. Notably, when the light becomes particularly strong, the houses vanish entirely, leaving behind only long shadows. Through this, the artist highlights the disappearance of materiality and the remaining of only images, evoking the existence of Kijong-dong as situated between reality and illusion.

Following Model Village, Hayoun Kwon developed an interest in the DMZ as an in-between space, leading her to conduct interviews with a former South Korean soldier. Her video work 489 Year (2015/2016) follows the memories of Mr. Kim, a reconnaissance soldier who once served in the DMZ.

The video reconstructs a new space-time based on Mr. Kim’s testimony about his experiences conducting reconnaissance missions in the DMZ and his discovery of areas dominated by unmarked mines. The locations described in his story are places prohibited to human entry, where nature has been left to reign entirely.

Through Mr. Kim’s story, Hayoun Kwon imagines the landscapes of an unreachable time and space, as well as the sensations within them. The vivid experience Kim describes—fantastical images of plants he had never seen before silhouetted under moonlight, combined with the life-or-death tension caused by the ever-present threat of North Korean soldiers and landmines—is reimagined through the artist’s lens.

To convey his story more vividly, Kwon chose virtual reality (VR) as her medium. VR, which unfolds entirely within the viewer’s personal field of vision, allows for a more immersive experience of Kim’s memories. The DMZ in Kim’s recollections becomes an intimate encounter for the viewer through the intermediate space of virtual reality crafted by the artist.

In this way, both Model Village and 489 Years invite viewers to briefly enter spaces that cannot be directly experienced. By evoking invisible borders of division and collective identity, these works summon ambiguous boundaries and incomplete memories.

In her 2017 work The Bird Lady, Hayoun Kwon once again employs VR technology as a medium to bridge reality and imagination. While her previous works followed a linear structure dictated by the narrator’s story, The Bird Lady incorporates the audience’s participation into the narrative structure.

Based on the memory of her teacher, Daniel, The Bird Lady is one of Kwon’s most personal works. The space that viewers enter through a VR headset is a recreation of the home of the "bird lady," who, according to Daniel’s memory, was known for collecting birds. Within this environment, the viewers physically moves around and explores a fascinating scene filled with birds and birdcages.

In The Bird Lady, the narrative unfolds according to each viewer’s pace and movements, such as climbing stairs, walking, or pausing to look around. Viewers are not only entering a space within someone else’s memory but also gaining the ability to control and intervene in the time within it. This allows for an intensified sensory presence in the virtual space, enabling deeper immersion into another person’s memory.

Furthermore, since the experience is conducted on an individual level, each viewer generates a unique and distinct experience. Starting from someone else’s personal memory, the work transitions into countless new personal dimensions for its audience, where it is reimagined and remembered anew.

In another virtual reality project, Peach Garden (2019), Hayoun Kwon expanded the interactive scope, enabling viewers to move freely within a larger space. This work also debuted the world’s first VR technology allowing up to four people to experience the piece simultaneously. In the vast, empty space, the slow movements of the viewers themselves become part of the artwork.

Inspired by Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land by early Joseon-era painter Ahn Gyeon, Peach Garden brings to life a mesmerizing and surreal world where the laws of nature do not apply. The space is divided into five distinct realms, but as viewers walk and listen within the virtual reality, they begin to lose their sense of orientation, making it difficult to discern which realm they are in. This blurs the boundaries between spaces.

While Hayoun Kwon’s earlier works reconstructed intimate personal memories to create virtual spaces for indirect experiences, starting in the 2020s, she began to explore public spaces and historical narratives. Her 2021 work, Kubo, Walks the city, delves into the landscapes and newspaper archives of early 20th-century Seoul, shedding light on the boundaries between freedom and censorship.

Kubo, Walks the city is a virtual reality piece inspired by the 1934 novel A Day in the Life of Kubo by Korean novelist Park Taewon. Kwon adds her interpretation of the era to reimagine the narrative in VR. Through the VR headset, viewers follow Kubo’s journey, experiencing the cityscape of that era.

The urban landscapes encountered in the experience appear as a black-and-white world, resembling a comic book, populated with 2D characters. This visual style is inspired by Manmunmanhwa, a popular satirical cartoon genre of the time, which aligns with Kubo’s critical perspective.

Due to press suppression in the 1930s, political cartoons criticizing the government could not be published. Instead, cartoonists turned to Manmunmanhwa, satirical cartoons that subtly critiqued society by depicting urban landscapes and social realities. Hayoun Kwon brought the essence of these urban lives portrayed in Manmunmanhwa into the new medium of virtual reality.

In Kubo, Walks the city, the characters inspired by Manmunmanhwa reveal issues like materialism, the marginalization of women, and youth unemployment, which resonate with contemporary societal challenges. This creates a layered cognitive experience where past and present overlap. Meanwhile, parts of the visual narrative are obscured in black, symbolizing the press censorship imposed by Japanese colonial rule at the time, allowing viewers to experience the era's restrictions on free expression.

Her new work, The Guardians of Jade Mountain (2024), currently being showcased in the "Korea Artist Prize 2024" exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), is based on a historical legend surrounding Jade Mountain, located in Taiwan. During Japanese occupation of Taiwan, the Bunun clan, an indigenous ethnic group living in Jade Mountain, strongly resisted. However, their stories and voices were not recorded in history.

The artist focused on the story of an anthropologist from Japan, Ushinosuke Mori, and his friendship with the leader of the Bunun clan, which she encountered during her initial research. By persistently delving into the records of these individuals, she uncovered the foundation of their story and recreated it as a poetic landscape.

In the virtual space created through VR media, the story of how Mori came to Taiwan unfolds as the viewers enter Jade Mountain. Holding a bamboo lantern, the viewers follow Mori’s footsteps and discover the flora and fauna of Jade Mountain.

Kwon, aiming to preserve the authenticity of the environment, has brought the plants of Jade Mountain, which vary according to altitude, into the virtual reality. Moreover, by linking the bamboo lantern held by the audience with the virtual bamboo lantern, a more immersive experience is created. As the lantern startles an owl into flight and the color of the leaves changes with the light, sensory moments that could be experienced in the real world unfold through the audience’s body in the virtual dimension.

By synchronizing the audience’s senses with reactions in the virtual reality, the audience is left with vivid and distinct memories, comparable to real-life experiences. As soon as the VR device is removed, the virtual Jade Mountain vanishes, and the audience returns to the real world. However, the landscapes of Jade Mountain and the sensations experienced within it linger in their memory.

Her work, which reconstructs both personal and collective memories, becomes reimagined through virtual reality. As the boundary between reality and the virtual blurs, so too does the distinction between self and other. In this way, the stories of others are felt and experienced through the audience's physical movements within her artwork, ultimately transforming into shared memories.

”VR allows us to experience someone else's perspective as our own, which makes it an excellent medium when dealing with subjective perspectives. I've always been interested in subjective perspectives because my focus has been on personal memories.

VR turns out to be an appropriate medium for me to incorporate the stories I want to tell into my work. I think I was drawn to it because it is the most powerful medium when it comes to questioning reality.” (Hayoun Kwon, MMCA “Transport to Another World” Artist Interview, 2024)

Hayoun Kown graduated from Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemprains and she lives and works in France and Korea. Kwon has participated in solo exhibitions at Arario Gallery (Shanghai, China) in 2019, Galerie Sator (Paris, France), Doosan Gallery (Seoul, Korea) in 2018, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France) in 2017, Lectoure Photo and Art Center (Lectoure, France), École des Beaux-Art Chateauroux (Chateauroux, France) in 2015.

Major group exhibitions included Ulsan Museum of Art (Ulsan, Korea) in 2022, MMCA (Seoul, Korea), Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea) in 2021, the Busan Biennale (Busan, Korea) in 2020, Ilmin Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), Nicolas Kunstahalle(Copenhagen, Denmark) in 2019, Arario Gallery Seoul (Seoul, Korea), Jean Grand Duke of Contemporary Art (Luxembourg), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea) in 2018, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, Korea), Nam June Paik Art Center (Youngin, Korea), MoMA (NY, US) in 2017, Art Sonje Center(Seoul, Korea) in 2015.

She won a number of awards in addition to Arc Electronica (Austria, 2018), Lisbon Indie Animation (Portugal, 2017), Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (Romania, 2017), Palais de Tokyo (France, 2015), European Media Festival (Germany, 2014), International Documentary Film Festival (Russia, 2014), and etc. She has been selected as one of the four finalists for the 2024 Korea Artist Prize and is currently showcasing her work at the MMCA Seoul.

References

• 권하윤, Hayoun Kwon (Artist Website)
• 아라리오갤러리, 권하윤 (Arario Gallery, Hayoun Kwon)
• 올해의 작가상 2024, 권하윤 (Korea Artist Prize 2024, Hayoun Kwon)
• 헬로! 아티스트, 권하윤 – 기억과 현실의 경계 
• 국립현대미술관, MMCA필름앤비디오 – 또 다른 이야기 (National Museum of Modern and Contemproary Art Korea(MMCA), MMCA Film & Video – Because the Story Is Not the Same) 
• 아트인사이트, [Opinion] VR로 경험하는 타인의 사적인 이야기 [미술/전시], 2024.07.22
• 국립현대미술관, “순간이동” 도록 (National Museum of Modern and Contemproary Art Korea(MMCA), Catalogue of “Transport to Another World”)