Daejeon Municipal Museum

Overview

From a Joseon anecdote to a future beyond the Expo — a five-surface immersive piece in which the world changes three times inside one room.

The structure is three acts. Act I is an illustrated narrative drawn from Joseon-era anecdotes, Act II a collage reassembled from archival photographs, and Act III a vividly coloured 2D and 3D motion graphic carrying the Expo into a future Daejeon. Each act was deliberately designed in a completely different style.

The risk was obvious. Change the visual language three times inside one work and the three acts read as three unrelated pieces. The usual answer is to match tone and sand down the seams — but that erases the character each act had in the first place.

So rather than stitching the styles together, the discontinuity was made the intent. Working with the development team, interactive content was placed after each act, letting visitors engage with the elements they had just watched; only once they had taken an act in fully were they carried into an entirely different world. The break stops being a defect and becomes the mechanism of the experience.

“I wanted visitors to enjoy an act fully and only then cross into a completely different world — because Daejeon is a city whose appeal spans things as unlike each other as history and science.”