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Experiencing Virtual Reality(Korea Times Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)By Park Chung-a Ahn Kwang-june is an artist who uses images from dreams as the main motif for his works. He talks about his dreams and a precarious boundary between reality and virtual reality through three-dimensional visual works and game art. Ahn is to hold his seventh solo exhibition at Savina Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul beginning next month. Unlike other conventional exhibitions, his unusual works require active participation from the audience, as they are obliged to wear specially designed glasses and use joysticks. With those glasses on, viewers can experience a surreal three-dimensional world in which dreamy images of Ahn's work pop out and move back and forth between reality and virtual reality. ``In the case of game art, which involves viewers' use of joysticks, works can give different effects depending on how actively the audience interacts with them,'' said Ahn. According to Ahn, his dreams not only offer various themes for his works but also an important motivation to pursue art. After majoring in atomic energy at university, he was an ordinary office worker. However at some point, he began having nightmares every single day for about a year without a specific reason. ``Even after I woke up, images of dreams would haunt me so vividly that it was almost impossible to lead a normal life. Thus I started to sketch them and seek an artistic means in order to realize mental comfort out of them. For me, painting was the only means to lead a life,'' Ahn said. ``A dream does not unfold in an inactive screen but in endlessly changing movements. It is not restrained by space or time. Thus a flat canvas was not good enough for me to express everything I had in mind.'' So he decided to use three-dimensional technology and a graphic software to recreate in detail the realm of dream, which was a temporary virtual reality. Instead of using traditional art tools such as pastel, acrylic and paint, he depends on clicks of a computer mouse and the insertion of numbers on a keyboard to express his world of dreams in vivid movements and colors. His representative work ``Space Mirror Object 2006'' has given life to whirling atmosphere and spiral of rainbow-colored clouds. As units of such images move at fixed speed, they form a symmetry with each other, which leads viewers with glasses to feel as if they are being put into a state of hypnosis. A surrealist technique, decalcomania, can be witnessed while those images make movements in a certain pattern in the process of integration. A work titled ``Oh Korea ! - Game of Four Evil'' is a three-dimensional visual game which leads the gamer to fight in a battle against leaders of four nations which are involved in an important political and economic power game with Korea. In ``Cyber Erotica Park 2006,'' Ahn has visualized an aspect of voyeurism in cyber space. ``Ahn is one of the rare artists who has been consistently working on discussing the matter of virtual reality. We expect that these surreal and unfamiliar images that are recreated through most state-of-the-art technology can pave the way for a new arena of media arts,'' said Hwang Jeong-in, a curator of the museum. |