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Bringing art to life with IT

New art exhibition held in Singapore includes artworks that can interact with visitors, and is a first to Southeast Asia outside of South Korea.
Written by Liau Yun Qing, Contributor

SINGAPORE--Mona Lisa answers questions about why she does not have eyebrows and winks at visitors to the new interactive art gallery opening here on Friday.

The exhibition, jointly organized by Quebec Leisure and MediaCorp Vizpro, will be the first time the technology from South Korea's Alive Gallery is brought to Southeast Asia.

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Source: Alive Gallery

Mona Lisa waving to the audience. The interactive art piece can answer questions from the audience. However, Alive Gallery CEO Hyun-Seung Nam revealed that voice recognition software is not as advanced yet, and there is actually a person answering behind the scene.

Divided into five sections according to time periods, the show features 49 exhibits, among which are computer-generated animation of characters from famous artworks as well as the painters themselves who will explain the meaning of their artwork to visitors.

The exhibition is located at Downtown East, and will run for three months from July 2 to October 3. In a media briefing Thursday, Yeoh Phee Suan, director of marketing and communications at NTUC (National Trade Union Congress) Club, said the exhibition hopes to bring in 60,000 to 70,000 visitors.

Costing US$4 million and two years to develop, Alive Gallery opened its doors in South Korea in 2008. The ongoing exhibition includes technology such as computer animation, 3D technology and holographic effects.

Hyun-Seung Nam, chief executive officer of Alive Gallery and developer of Alive Gallery Singapore Exhibition, said the idea for the gallery came to him after his undergraduate classes on the history of art, where he learned about the philosophy, sociology and science in paintings.

He reflected that if paintings were able to come alive and explain themselves, more people would appreciate the masterpieces. According to Nam, South Korea's advanced development in ICT (information communication technology) made it easy for him to combine content and technology.

Bringing the gallery to Singapore was not without challenges, however. Nam said space constraint was one of the problems as the art gallery in Korea has over 3,000 square meter of exhibition space, but the gallery here is a quarter of that. The exhibitors had to figure out how to express the content in a relatively compact area without losing the overall experience of the exhibition.

Gerald Edwards, deputy general manager of Quebec Leisure, added that the exhibition gallery at Downtown East is about 8,000 square feet (743.2 square meter).

Time was another constraint, said Nam, as the Alive Gallery was developing more content in 3D for this exhibition. Edwards added that the whole show took slightly less than four weeks to set up in Singapore.

Asked why the gallery included Western art instead of Asian artworks, Nam explained that the former is more well-known and most of the famous paintings are legacy from Western artists.

That said, Nam assured that the Alive Gallery's next step is to include Asian artwork, though he noted that this would be a greater challenge as Chinese paintings include not only the scenery but also poems, which may take much longer to convey their meaning to the audience.

Nam is targeting Alive Gallery's exhibition at youngsters, and hopes the show will instill creative thinking in this group as well as allow them to better understand and appreciate art history.

He said that when the exhibition first opened in Korea, the audience comprised mainly children initially, followed later by college students, with some majoring in the arts, computer graphics and ICT.

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