Mokpo National Maritime Museum

Overview

A 360° underwater projection circling a single shipwreck — the salvaged hull put back under the sea.

The paradox of a maritime artefact exhibition is that the moment the ship is lifted out of the water to preserve it, the environment it belonged to disappears. What the visitor sees is a timber structure under dry gallery lighting. The job of this piece was not to explain the artefact but to put the vanished environment back around it.

The screens are arranged to surround the visitor. Underwater is a space with a weak sense of up and down and poor visibility, so depth is built from the density of particulate, light shafts and current rather than from a clear focal point. Wherever the eye lands it registers underwater, and the physical artefact sits in the middle of it.

AI generation handled the elements that are awkward to build procedurally — light shafts, suspended particles, sediment texture — while the hull and artefact forms were handled against exhibition reference material. With the real object standing next to the screen, any discrepancy in form shows immediately.

“Instead of explaining the artefact, the environment it came from was put back around it.”