National Museum of Korean Contemporary History

Overview

How advertising reflected its era — a century of Korean daily life traced through advertising across a 15,180px, five-surface room.

The subject is not advertising itself but how advertising, as a medium, reflected the changing eras of modern Korea. The room is screen on five surfaces — four walls and the floor — and laid end to end it runs 15,180px.

At that width no single area can carry the composition: the visitor cannot take in the whole surface at once. So several zones of visual attention were distributed across it, and the long and short walls were staged at times as one continuous screen and at times as separate ones. Each act, divided by era, was designed in a tone and manner representing that period.

The hard constraint was resolution. Most of the advertisements existed only as low-resolution images, unusable as they stood on a 15,180×1,200 screen, and sourcing them was a job in itself — some came from the museum, but much had to be requested directly from the Korea Advertising Association archive. Many were AI-upscaled before use, and where low resolution actually served the period feel it was left alone. Commercials that resisted upscaling were handled by staging a television inside the frame and playing the ad within it — turning a resolution limit into a directorial device.

“Rather than making one part of the frame the focal point, I placed several zones where attention gathers.”