Stories
    I focus on enhancing the immersive experiences in art exhibitions by using AR technology in hand held devices such as smart phones. By adding animations on the smart phone, I want to provide deeper narratives related to the painting. The content of the installation and animations for the AR experience will be about my own memory and real life experiences. The painting, “family”, represents the experience of being a mother of two children. The dollhouse installation, “memory”, contains my memories and thought about life and death. "Family" is a self-portrait. There is no symbolic cues related to a word, family. There are my profile, a house, and the Stone Mountain in Georgia where I currently live in. The house resembles the doll house I made for this project. The painting only provides the limited information about me. More narratives continue on an animation provided by AR mobile phones. The animation generates a new understanding of the painting. The animation helps viewers remind why the painting is called “family”. Boy and girl, my kids,are overlaid on the painting in the screen of the phone. The hand drawn children are running toward the dollhouse on the painting. The painting and animation notify viewers that I am going to talk about my-self and my children. The children’s movements of entering the house introduce deeper stories about the doll house. The stories are about my fears and hope about life and death related to memories of my births of two children, loss of two pregnancies, and my father who was recently suffered from a life threatening illness.
    Next to the painting, there is a dollhouse that looks like the house in the painting. The dollhouse is artistically painted and presents the space of the artist’s imaginary world. There are three floors. The first floor of the house presents my unconscious world. The second floor of the house reflects my real world memories and thought about life and death. The third floor of the house presents my hope for the unknown world.
    The first floor contains two rooms. In the rooms, there are floating stones on the water and the walls around the stone images (trackables) are painted black and white. In the mobile AR view, viewers will see floating stones above the water and a tiger on the first floor of the doll house. The stones in my painting symbolize my unspoken desires. I drew the floating stones whenever I wanted to do something unable or prohibited. For example, my life goal as a successful artist was built when I was children. The desire to be a better artist is so strong that I feel like it is a heavy burden. Instead of speaking or expressing about the desire or dream, I used to draw the floating stone symbols when I wanted to express my desires and get more confidence. I can lift up the heavy stones and make them floating even if it looks impossible. The room on the right presents my hidden fears. The tiger animation provided on the AR mobile expresses the fears of weakness, failure, and death. The constantly changing tiger gives me the feeling of unexpected dangers. The fears mostly came from the memories of my father’s illness and my loss of two pregnancies.
    The second floor presents real world memories. When I spent time with my father in the hospital, I saw a lot of life supporting tubes around him. His fragile appearance and dependency on the nutrition and medicines provided by the tubes reminded me a fetus on mother’s belly attached by umbilical cord. Without the cords they both cannot survive. At that time, I realized really common facts that my father eventually will die and I will die. I was afraid for the death. Then, I relieved because of the fact that my children would keep having births and make new lives. Everybody knows the fact but I never felt what it mean from my deep heart before I saw my father in the hospital. The fetus animation, presented in the next room, symbolizes my hope, creativity, and energy to overcome the fears. I drew the fetus images when I had my baby in my belly. The successful pregnancy and birth gave me happiness and confidence to overcome the painful memory of my lost first pregnancy.
    At the top floor, there is the sky and a rock on the sea.  The place is from my childhood memory in Sokcho in Korea. The animation related to the space contains flying two angels and clouds in the sky. The angels are my two lost fetuses who live in the heaven. I wanted to have a girl when I had my first pregnancy loss and I drew an angel with wings and girl’s face. I wanted to have a boy when I had the second pregnancy loss and I drew another angel looked like a boy.  
    In this AR art project, I want to present imaginary spaces and help viewers imagine the spaces in their own memory. My space is filled with symbolic figures of happiness, joy, sorrow, fears, and hope and they are all from my memory. I am an artist who expresses the true feelings by drawing symbolic images. What I want viewers to visualize is unseen worlds, limitless unconscious worlds created by the artists and the viewers. I provide two options for the viewers. Passive viewers can only enjoy the textures and colors of my work but active viewers will get deeper levels of my stories and know my memories and emotions.
 
 
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