Hayoun Kwon's works not only take advantage of new technologies, but also question their widespread use and examine their limits. Hayoun Kwon’s video works, which combine animated cinema and documentary, create an unsettling confusion between dreams and reality, testimony and interpretation, memory and imagination. Immersive, fascinating and even disturbing, her works produce unique individual experiences which reveal the ambiguity of our relationship with reality and memories.

Offering a true immersion in memoryscapes, the use of 3D and virtual reality open up the field of possibilities and unexplored realms, creating new “fictional realities”. Equipped with a virtual reality headset, viewers virtually immerse themselves in another world, while remaining physically in our own. The two realities intertwine and meld, shifting the real towards its representation and the representation towards reality.

Inspired by Walt Disney’s animated Fantasia, a VR work La Péri, created by Hayoun Kwon in 2016, offers the viewer an intense immersive experience of incredible technical complexity and rare poetry.

La Péri begins as a ballet in one act composed by Paul Dukas, known for his work “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. In Hayoun Kwon's film, the viewers are invited to go on stage to don a virtual reality headset. They are then literally immersed in the heart of an enchanting and fantastic 3D world in which they play Iskander, a dying prince in search of the “flower of immortality”, who a guardian spirit, La Péri, is trying to distract from his goal with a bewitching ballet.