 |
| French media artist Miguel Chevalier is holding his second solo exhibition “Digital Beauty 2023 Season 2” through Feb. 12, 2024. Courtesy of Ara Art Center |
By Lee Gyu-lee
French media artist Miguel Chevalier is back in Seoul with another solo exhibition “Digital Beauty 2023 Season 2” in Seoul, inviting audiences to an immersive experience of his digitally created artistic vision.
 |
| A photo of “Magic Carpets,” one of the installations by Miguel Chevalier at the exhibition “Digital Beauty 2023 Season 2” / Courtesy of Ara Art Center |
Chevalier, a pioneer in the uncharted realm of digital art since the late 1970s, put on display 14 immersive installations that span the Ara Art Center’s five floors. Each piece is designed to engage with the architectural nuances of the venue, offering a colorful and ever-changing visual experience.
Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are welcomed by “Complex Meshes,” a three-sided screen installation colorfully covered in different layers of patterns and shapes that change every minute, representing a universe of interconnected networks.
As visitors move through the space, their footsteps trigger the digitally generated meshes to transform into different colors and shapes, creating a unique, interactive experience.
Chevalier explained that interactions mean everything in sharing his artistic vision with audiences.
“For me, the idea of interactivity is something that enlarges the sensation of the relationship with the art. Because normally the art is fixed and you have the sensation of the art but can’t modify the piece. And here with the digital, you can interact and you can create a variation that I think is different (from other mediums),” Chevalier told The Korea Times, during the interview at the exhibition, Thursday.
“(Digital art) is something that you cannot do with the other media. So it’s one of the advantages that you can do with the digital.”
 |
| Visitors walk on the interactive, immersive media installation “Magic Carpets” by Miguel Chevalier. Courtesy of Ara Art Center |
The artist, who has utilized technology to create responsive, virtual reality installations for decades, believes that digital art opens up new frontiers in the art world and he still strives to build a strong groundwork to explore new territory in adopting digital into the broader landscape.
“What I am doing with some other artists in different parts of the world is how the digital can be a new part of the art today. This is not to say that the painting is not good or not well, nor the photography or video is not well. But in parallel of all this medium, the digital it’s a new territory; a (new) version,” he said.
“The digitals cover all the fields that you can do with the painting, the sculpture and the photography. So for me, it’s very the art of the 21st century.”
Chevalier takes inspiration from close reality, from social relationships to microorganisms, and his work often serves as a metaphor for today’s interconnected world. “The Origin of the World 2023” uses multi-layered pixels to visualize these complex relationships.
“It’s a visualization of something invisible. It’s a materialization of the idea that you would say ‘Oh how I can explain it?’ like the sensation of the networks you have with people. So of course it’s a sort of metaphor about the world that we are living in today,” he said.
He shared that the overall message of his artworks is about stimulating audiences to become familiar with and receptive to new artistic mediums.
“If you have some idea, you can enlarge and explore the possibility of this field completely. So the idea is more and more to adapt in relationship with the evolution of the technique and technology, and how to integrate and create new concepts and new ideas about all of what happened today.”