Some of our favorite art installations are ones that play with their environment. There’s something transformative and magical about altering a space most people are already familiar with. Maybe it’s the Cinderella-like nature of it all that makes it special. Art installations are, after all, fleeting things. For a few days or weeks the ordinary becomes the extraordinary and then suddenly, as if the clock has struck 12, the magic is gone. The magic Lee Eunyeol has created flips the very Earth and sky itself.

 

 

Starry Night, not to be confused with the painting of the same name, takes the stars from the sky and scatters them on the ground, over different landscapes. It creates a story that anyone can mentally fill in. Perhaps they have fallen from the sky, or maybe they’ve been sneakily growing from the ground this entire time. Eunyeol created this series for the Gana Art Space in Seoul, with the intention of of playing with space. In an artistic statement for Colossal, he writes:

“Starry night expresses private spaces given by night and various emotions that are not able to be defined and described in the space. I’ve chosen analogue type for the expression which attempts to install electric bulbs in an objet to be expressed using back space of night by taking advantage of huge studio. There are two spaces in photographs. One is a space before electric bulbs of familiar landscape are installed and the other is a space after electric bulbs expressed by dispersing personal emotion are installed. Unified light from these two spaces generates a mysterious landscape.”

His landscape is mysterious and wondrous indeed. He pulls together different environments and despite using the same tooks, creates a different feel for each.

Each environment utilizes the light in a different way. One scene has a beautiful yet ominous glow of stars from within the cracks of the earth. Another seems to have stars growing in a field, round like cabbage. Little stars rise up gently from fields and trees, as if nature has always been this way. More often than not, the sky captured in each scene are gentle and dark. They are a blank yet warm space of color that are only disturbed now and then by the streak of what seems to be shooting stars, created, perhaps, by a bit of time-lapse. It’s an installation that is all about experience and will be part of the Gana Art Space for a limited time.

To see more of this great installation, check out the piece on This is Colossal!