Take 'Bigger & Closer' step into David Hockney's immersive digital wonderland in Seoul

Installation view of David Hockney's immersive digital show, “Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away),” at Lightroom Seoul in Godeok-dong / Courtesy of Lightroom Seoul

By Park Han-sol

• Published Nov 4, 2023 9:51 AM KST
• Updated Nov 6, 2023 8:51 AM KST

Throughout a career spanning over 60 years, British artist David Hockney has persistently incorporated new forms of technology in his genre-crossing art – from cubist Polaroid photo collages in the 1980s to iPad landscape paintings in the last decade.

Now, the octogenarian icon, who revolutionized the style of painting called British Pop Art, joins a new trend in picture making – a blockbuster immersive digital show.

After opening in London in February, Hockney’s 50-minute experiential spectacle, “Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away),” opened on Nov. 1 at Lightroom Seoul, a new lightbox-like venue in Godeok-dong, a suburb in the southeastern part of the capital.

The space, established in partnership with Etnah Company here, marks the first international venue for U.K.-based Lightroom.

In many ways, the artist’s new technological venture echoes the recent fad of interactive art shows around the world, where masterpieces by the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Salvador Dali and Gustav Klimt come to life via floor-to-ceiling digital projections and majestic orchestral soundscapes.

But according to Lightroom’s CEO Richard Slaney, there is one defining characteristic that sets their production apart from other competing immersive spectacles.

“We’re working directly with the artist. It’s not up to me if this is the right way to present; it’s up to David Hockney,” he said at a recent press preview.

In other words, Lightroom’s exhibition is not a posthumous display of long-deceased artists’ licensed tours de force, but rather a product of collaboration with living creators who have the final say in the presentation.

“Bigger & Closer,” the company’s inaugural project, took four years to come to fruition.

The show, arranged in six thematic sections, bathes its visitors in a strikingly animated wonderland of Hockney’s sketches, oil paintings, watercolors, stage designs and videos.

Audiences are free to walk around the venue while experiencing his recognizable brush and digital works stretched out across the four walls and floor.

These pieces include “A Bigger Splash,” which freezes the dynamic moment of a diver’s splash in a sun-drenched pool, and “Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986 (Second Version),” a photographic collage that weaves together a deserted Southern California landscape with fragmented snapshots.

Accompanying such large-scale projections is the orchestral music of American composer Nico Muhly, along with the artist’s own reflective narration.

“It looks as though the champagne has been poured over the bushes. You can’t be bored of nature, can you?” Hockney says as he muses on the joyfulness of nature that inspired his panoramic “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven),” a kaleidoscope of swirling brushstrokes depicting the picturesque English countryside.

The section that perhaps benefits most from Lightroom’s immersive digital technology focuses on the artist’s lesser-known opera stage designs from the 1970s to the 1990s.

His designs of dancing bats in a neon-blue forest from “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges,” the scarlet-hued palatial walls of China from “Turandot” and the distinctly angular ship’s sail from “Tristan und Isolde” all spring to life in a way never seen before.

Hockney was “thrilled with the result” when the exhibition finally opened this year, Slaney noted. “His works are in a million galleries around the world, but this project speaks directly to people – from three-year-old children to those in their 90s, who are all enjoying the same thing together.”

“Bigger & Closer” runs through May 31, 2024 at Lightroom Seoul.