RCA Degree Show_Bengal Rose and Tadpoles & Mixed Reality

In the era of ecological crisis and technological acceleration, this work explores how painting can remain alive, how it can breathe, evolve, and respond within the complex relations between humans, nature, and machines.

This work was presented at Hyunah Koh’s RCA Degree Show, where the artist invited audiences to enter her paintings both physically and perceptually. It marked her first experiment integrating Mixed Reality into painting, expanding her long-standing practice of working with the body, touch, and material presence.

In this project, Koh investigates how painting can act as an ecological interface, a living environment that mediates between the physical and the digital, the tactile and the imaginary. The artist enters her own paintings during the making process, rotating her body 360 degrees while painting from within the canvas. Through this act, her body, hands, and mind align with the work in a meditative rhythm, seeking unity with the surface itself. This embodied approach later extends into the exhibition, where Mixed Reality overlays digital layers onto the physical painting, creating a shared space of navigation between artwork and viewer.

Viewers are invited to touch and move through the installation using Mixed Reality headsets, experiencing shifting layers of texture and virtual imagery. As they explore, modeling-clay fragments echo the tactile surfaces of Koh’s paintings, allowing imagination and sensation to merge. The slight weight and resistance of the headset heighten awareness of the body, awakening dormant senses into new forms of perception.

For Koh, this work reflects her vision of painting as an ecological ecosystem, where painting evolves beyond image into an environment of interaction, touch, and coexistence. Like looking into a pond where microorganisms, plants, and reflections coexist, the viewer perceives both the living density beneath the surface and the tranquil unity above it. In this act of looking, touching, and moving, the artist invites us to reconsider how life, perception, and ecology interconnect within and beyond the painted world.