"Surreal Sequence / Illusion" - Lotte VL LeWest Gallery

As visitors enter the first-floor central hall, brushstrokes on the media art wall ahead gather into a sunlit forest and then scatter again. In January 2023, Apollon Immersive Works proposed and curated two media artworks for the media art wall in the first-floor central hall of Lotte VL LeWest Gallery. The space was designed around a botanic garden concept, bringing together modern interiors and analogue landscaping. Apollon Immersive Works set out to extend the central hall into something more surreal through media art, so that visitors could immerse themselves in the space with a new sense.

With spring as the core theme, nature was reinterpreted in a metaphorical and abstract way to bring liveliness and flow to the space. Media artist CLAUDE drew motifs from the character of spring and the dynamic movements of nature, namely the changes of color and light and the swaying of leaves, and created two media artworks using digital abstract expression techniques.

The media art wall presenting the two works stands at the core, directly facing visitors as they enter the first-floor central hall. The LED display, measuring W5,120 x H4,320, fills an entire wall, shaping the overall impression of the space from afar and capable of overwhelming viewers up close. To bring out the depth and perspective of the space, the approach was to make full use of the display area and fill the wall with media art.

<Surreal Sequence> expresses the world of our unconscious and of nature in digital form. Just as flowers and trees sway in the wind, linear particles drawn from nature scatter into abstract forms along the direction of the wind, creating a path through the forest and leading the dreaming self down a new path. CLAUDE renders the sunlit forest in a familiar, figurative form while unraveling its elements and principles into digital particles, leaving room for viewers to immerse themselves in the work.

<Illusion> is an even more surreal and fantastical work. Scattered, overlapping textures and deliberately loose blooms of light and color in a virtual space evoke the subtle feeling of gazing at a calm landscape and the unfamiliar freedom of encountering a new environment. CLAUDE paints a variety of inner colors onto a vast dreamscape with matte yet soft brushstrokes, letting viewers experience the concrete world gradually turning into a surreal inner landscape.