What comes to your mind first when thinking about an art exhibition? You might feel uncomfortable rather than feel excited. However, what if you were able to look at pictures in an exhibition along with music that fits the pictures? What if you were able to touch all the paintings by famous artists as they are transformed into digital images?

These assumptions are not just a part of the imagination, but are real news here at “Van Gogh Inside: Festival of Light and Music” (Van Gogh Inside). Recently, media art displays, in which artworks are combined with advanced technology, have become an important trend in the world of exhibitions. To keep up with this trend, Van Gogh Inside, which ran from this January to April, grafted the great painter Van Gogh’s works to state-of-the-art technology with digital images and diverse interactive zones. The May issue of the Culture Trip invites you to this unique exhibition.

What is Van Gogh Inside: Festival of Light and Music?

1) What is a media art display?
A media art display is a form of show linking artworks with new media technologies that include digital art, computer animation and interactive art.

Contrary to conventional art exhibits, media art displays are now becoming more popular with various audiences in that they enable people to have direct interactions with the artworks in shows.

2) Introduction to Van Gogh Inside
Media N Art Corporation began a series of large-scale media art displays about Van Gogh in 2014. The first series was “Van Gogh's A Record of 10 Years Exhibition” and the second one was “Van Gogh's Media Art” in 2015. These two exhibition series attracted about 300,000 spectators.

Van Gogh Inside, the third series in 2016, introduced Van Gogh’s 247 paintings, including his masterpieces - “Self-Portrait,” and “The Starry Night” - and 153 other paintings by impressionists such as Claude Monet, William Turner, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

The corporation has held the exhibition on Van Gogh three times in a row as people have been fascinated by his vivid work and tragic life, according to Ji Seong-wook, the exhibition organizer.

3) Staging
Van Gogh Inside uses second generation media art displays with active staging rather than first generation forms which simply change existing artworks into digital contents and just displays them.

From a visual side, inside Cultural Station Seoul 284, which is the former Seoul Station and where the exhibition takes places, the paintings have been transformed into digital images and are projected through full HD projectors onto big screens, domes, ceilings, floors, and the walls of the station.

Regarding the auditory aspect, instrumental background music was composed for each digital art zone which shows the digital artworks. The company also adopted a variety of interactive zones where viewers can go through diverse activities derived from the original works with advanced digital machines.

Trip to Van Gogh Inside

At 2 p.m. on April 2, The Argus reporter arrived at Cultural Station 284 where the Van Gogh Inside exhibition is being held. At the entrance, lots of people were waiting in line. The reporter could only go into the exhibition after a wait of 15 minutes. The exhibition had two floors with each floor having both several digital art and interactive zones. Each of the four digital zones required around eight to 12 minutes to experience to follow in the artistic footsteps of Van Gogh. After passing a ticket office, the first digital zone the reporter saw was Nuenen’s Another Sunrise.

First Floor

Nuenen’s Another Sunrise
The first zone had many screens. A total of eight screens including a central one were equipped in the zone. Each screen showed different digital pictures. The reporter asked a nearby guide about what kinds of pictures were being shown.

“This zone shows impressionist paintings created by artists such as Claude Monet, William Turner, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who tried to capture the light of every moment,” the guide said. “Also, it has Gogh’s early works in Nuenen where he spent time with his parents.”

A special thing about the display was that the digital works are shown for about three seconds and then changed into countless dots. From a picture where naked women come together, the women’s bodies became numberless dots. The picture was like a set of dots. Why are there so many dots here in the pictures?

The guide explained that changing a picture into dots was intentional. “We wanted visitors to know that the impressionists focused on every light by dividing pictures into small dots,” the guide said.

Paris’ One Fine Day
The next show was Paris’ One Fine Day. Inside the show, digital works were projected onto a large screen in the center, the dome on the screen, and curtains from side to side as well. 

A subtitle offered, “These pictures were drawn when Gogh moved to Paris and indulged in Japanese art,” on the screen. Like the title read, several bright works that had been influenced by Japanese trends filled the screen. A few minutes later, “Self-Portrait,” a famous picture, came up on every place in the Paris zone. Looking at the digital version of “Self-Portrait,” from the bottom of the screen to the end of the dome, the whole building looked like a great canvas.

“Mom, I touched Gogh’s clothes,” a young boy said to his mother as he saw the picture on the curtain. The Argus approached the boy’s family and interviewed them. “I came here with my eight-year-old son. He keeps touching every picture shown on this curtain. He seems to like this exhibition very much,” said the young boy’s mother.

Vincent Library & Palette of Light

After visiting the two digital zones, the reporter dropped by the interactive zones on the first floor.

The first one was the Vincent Library. Five tablet PCs were on the table and people were doing something on them with their fingers. The reporter came near an empty PC and looked into what it was doing. Surprisingly, the PC was about painting Gogh’s unpainted pictures with a finger. The reporter selected “Self-Portrait” and colored Gogh’s hat with an orange color.

At the Palette of Light, next to the library zone, children were gathering together in front of a dazzling plate with yellow and blue colors. The reporter came closer and found children were completing Gogh’s picture of “The Starry Night” with blue and yellow acrylic rods. It was interesting to see the picture on the plate change as the children applied their rods.

Second Floor

The Night Cafe
The reporter went up the stairs, and reached another interactive zone, The Night Cafe. When asking about this zone, the staff said, “By wearing virtual reality gear, people can enter a space with tables and chairs and walk around, traveling back in time to the 19th century French cafe portrayed in Gogh’s picture, ‘The Night Cafe.’" Inside the zone, a female visitor wearing the gear yelled, “Oh, no! I am so dizzy.”

The Starry Night of Arles
“This zone has Gogh’s drawings that were created when he came to Arles for recuperation and entered a nearby mental hospital.” Before the reporter went into the third zone, The Starry Night of Arles, a guide board made the reporter curious about what pictures Gogh drew during this critical artistic period.

The Arles zone had a round shape. In this zone, the reporter could see pictures in a 360-degree view, which means screens were placed in all directions. Additionally, pictures were projected even onto the ceiling.

Soon, the digital arts of “The Starry Night” by Gogh came up on lots of screens at the same time. An image of stars and the sky were separated from the picture and shown on the ceiling. The reporter could specifically see every part of Van Gogh's work, moving his body in all directions. Yellow stars, which were about to explode, a giant spiral galaxy, and a tree towered against the sky. All these parts were obviously seen as they became a lot bigger on the screens. The reporter imagined Gogh’s passionate feelings he felt while drawing this picture.

Happily, the reporter met a female visitor in her 20s who had thoughts similar to the reporter’s. “Watching stars and the sky on the ceiling, I feel like I am living in the picture. I can actually feel Gogh’s depression,” she said.

At the Blue Wheat Field in Auber
The final zone, At the Blue Wheat Field in Auber, had a similar form as the third area. “These artworks were completed when Gogh spent 70 days before he died in the rural city of Auber with its fruit gardens and wheat fields,” the subtitle on the central screen proclaimed before Gogh’s pictures were displayed.

Each artwork whose subject is usually gardens and fields was shown along with sound. The sounds of song-birds, bugs, and moving fields came out of the respective artworks and created a rural atmosphere. Suddenly, the music stopped. The reporter wondered if the machine had broken. Then, a big shot was heard. In a picture on the screen, “Wheat Field with Crows” by Gogh, digital images of frightened crows flew away through the ceiling. It implied Van Gogh shot himself. 

A viewer in his 30s had this to say, “I cried after I heard the shot and looked at the crows flying. As I passed the four zones, it seems like I passed through the entire life of Van Gogh.”

Soon, an explanation subtitle appeared on the screen, which read, “The 37-year-old artist left this world at the wheat field.” The show ended after showing Gogh’s words saying, “My arts, I risked my life for them.”

The Argus spent one day at Van Gogh Inside and looked into how the artwork met high technology. In May, the Month of the Family, some people visit art exhibitions with their families. During this May, how about going to exhibitions like Van Gogh Inside? If you ask about what appealed most to the reporter, the answer is that you can actually experience Van Gogh’s work and his life. Although he is dead, Vincent Van Gogh is still ‘LIVING’ here at Van Gogh Inside.