"Hotel Meta" — VR Exhibition
Hosted by: Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Korea Arts Council
Dates: November 16-29, 2022
Location: Basement 1, Yeonnamjang
"Hotel Meta" is a metaverse art exhibition created by four artists—Hyerin Kim, Myungseok Oh, Suryeon Yoon, and Hwayoung Lee—to communicate memories, experiences, and emotions from the unconscious and inner self. In this exhibition, the hotel symbolizes both the space expressing the artists’ subconscious and a place for empathy and solidarity between the artists and the audience. Visitors will experience the artists’ subconscious through the metaverse in a profound way.
Similar to how Van Gogh’s swirling and anxious inner state was depicted through the setting of his room in his Impressionist series “The Bedroom,” a person’s room in Hotel Meta becomes a portrait representing their self based on the traces of their daily life. The exhibition features individual rooms created by the artists, centered around themes such as pain, nostalgia, curiosity, and discomfort. These four rooms are surreal spaces restructured from the artists’ personal everyday stories. Utilizing tools like real-time graphic engines and AI chatbots, the artists visualize their subconscious and inner selves, vividly recreating these as tangible experiences. Visitors can explore the rooms driven by curiosity and interact with objects within them. Ultimately, they share their own stories and participate in the conversation of the subconscious.
This exhibition uniquely envisions a metaverse organically connected to reality, offering an integrated experience of virtual and real worlds, as well as online and offline environments. The virtual spaces are designed to mirror the scale and layout of the physical exhibition, allowing visitors to walk through the gallery with VR devices. Meanwhile, their presence is also visualized in the metaverse, and the participation records from both online and offline visitors are shared and displayed. Additionally, these participation records accumulate and influence the objects within the rooms. This exhibition, created through the fusion of technology and art, discovers the potential of the metaverse as a space where artists and visitors assimilate and coexist, and explores new ways for art to empathize and communicate with its audience.
Exhibition Preface
Written by: Jeanho CHU
This exhibition was created with support from the Korea Arts Council’s Metaverse Art Activity Support Project in 2022.
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