Meet K-Contents in Virtual Reality in Paris, for ‘The Year of the Creative Economy’
Director Bong Joon-ho praised, ‘It was a completely new experience that cannot be felt in the movie theatre’
UNESCO exhibition tweets totalling to 66,000 retweets and 850,000 views by hallyu fans
[해외특파원 1기 / 박주영 기자] 2021 is the ‘International Year of the Creative Economy for Sustainable Development’ set by the United Nations.
To commemorate the ‘International Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development’, at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France, on July 6th 2021 (local time), the Korean Wave was held to share South Korea’s imagination for the future after COVID-19 with the world. It successfully opened the exhibition ‘Korea: Cubically Imagined’, where you could enjoy representative content such as convergence and immersive contents.
The opening reception was held in Paris and was attended by a large number of cultural figures. Among them, Ernesto Otone, secretary general of the cultural sector stated, praising the excellence of Korean immersive content,“The global success of Korean popular culture, such as K-pop and K-movies, is the result of the Korean government’s policy achievements in the immersive content industry. It shows directly.
The representative contents of this event are the spatial experience of the movie <Parasite> and the performance stage of BTS’ <MAP OF THE SOUL ON:E>.The performances were exhibited in a cubic space with LED lights on 3 surfaces.
Through the VR device, audiences were able to enjoy the performance with 360-degree realistic images, and they were able to see virtual reality contents where they could experience as if they were actually present in the main background of the movie.
Director Bong Joon-ho of the movie <Parasite> praised the event, saying, “It was a completely new experience that cannot be felt in the movie theater” after experiencing the realistic content of <Parasite> through a preview in June.
This exhibition, which was very meaningful as the first event to be held after the long blockade of UNESCO headquarters, was able to confirm the explosive expectations of Hallyu fans around the world from the pre-promotion period. On June 8th, UNESCO’s tweet introducing this exhibition recorded more than 66,000 retweets thanks to BTS’ fan retweets, which became the largest retweet in the history of UNESCO’s network. The number of pre-promotional video views reached a total of 850,000. As a result, I was able to feel the enthusiasm of Korean Wave fans around the world who wanted to visit this exhibition despite COVID19 pandemic.
From July 16th, the end of the exhibition, an online exhibition hall was opened so that visitors from all over the world could freely view it. The Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Hwang Hee stated, “With this immersive content exhibition, we will provide an opportunity for overseas fans to experience immersive Hallyu content and strive to continuously spread the Korean Wave. As a place to show, we expect that it will serve as an opportunity for the content industry to enter overseas markets more actively in the future.”
Jeon Jeon-woong, director of the Korean Cultural Center in France, expressed, “From this year, we will continue to carry out the media art mapping exhibition project in the center to show French people excellent media art that incorporates top technical technology.”
In the digital media mapping sector, various technology companies and artists such as works of Korea’s representative district, media artist Lee Yeon Kang’s works and VR works participated together to show the French public the splendid technology and artistic imagination of realistic Korean content. It is expected that the image of Korea will be further strengthened in France, hopefully expanding to a global scale.
