Media art festival 'Seoul Light DDP' illuminates Dongdaemun Design Plaza for fall edition

As the late summer sun set on Thursday evening, Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) — central Seoul’s cultural landmark designed by famed architect Zaha Hadid — lit up with glittering art.

Media art is being displayed on the facade of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in central Seoul during the 2025 fall edition of the biannual ″Seoul Light DDP″ on Aug. 28. [NEWS1]

As the late summer sun set on Thursday evening, Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) — central Seoul’s cultural landmark designed by famed architect Zaha Hadid — lit up with renowned contemporary art.

Across its 222-meter-long (728-foot-long) curving facade, dozens of floating eyes by French conceptual artist Laurent Grasso eerily stared at the passersby, who also stared back in awe. Luscious scenes of nature by local media art company d’strict recreated the Earth’s grandeur against the DDP’s concrete walls.

Beneath the main entry bridge, visitors stepped into hundreds of laser beams by Taiwanese light artist Aka Chang, dreamily stretching out their arms toward rays that seemed almost within reach yet, in reality, were intangible.

The works are part of the triannual media art festival “Seoul Light DDP" — its fall edition titled “Everflow: Moving Field.” The exhibit strives to embody the rhythm of Seoul through light and art, with its bright beams moving like a living organism against the DDP’s wavy exterior and actively interacting with its viewers without boundaries.

It began with free viewings on Thursday and is slated to run every evening from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. through Sept. 7.

Media art is being displayed on the facade of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in central Seoul during the fall edition of the biannual ″Seoul Light DDP″ on Aug. 28. [NEWS1]

“It was a magical experience to create against the DDP facade, as the building itself carries such a strong presence, and its irregular form feels almost alive,” Grasso told reporters on Thursday at the DPP. “That sense of vitality inspired me to incorporate eyes into my work, so that they too appear alive, interacting with viewers who encounter them. In this way, the eyes become more than an image; they take on the quality of an organic, living being.”

The work, titled “Panoptes,” inspired by the Greek myth of the many-eyed guardian Argos Panoptes, is featured at the festival along with “Solar Wind,” which is a hypnotic abstraction that translates cosmic data into colored wavelengths.

Chang’s “Multimmersion_DDP25” aims to create poetic tension between the light beams and the DDP’s structure, forging a dialogue between light and architecture. The shapes of the light alter in response to natural forces, such as the wind and smoke artificially created at the exhibit, allowing the piece to coexist with its environment.

“By bringing my straight, horizontal streams of light into the architecture of the DDP, I hope to offer audiences a distinctive experience — one where we share the same time and space, yet encounter it in profoundly different ways,” said Chang.

Korean media art company d’strict is showcasing “Eternal Nature,” which reinterprets nature’s properties with digital technology.

Media art is being displayed on the facade of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza during the 2025 fall edition of the biannual ″Seoul Light DDP″ on Aug. 28. [NEWS1]

The exhibition also displays videos created with AI. Using video generation platform Sora, Korean artist Choi Se-hun features “The Valley and the Light,” a dreamlike landscape where memory, illusion, technology and emotion intersect through light and image. German artist Timo Helgert stages “Moon Cycle,” projecting hundreds of moons across the facade in a poetic visualization of time and emotion.

“Over the past seven years, Seoul Light DDP has illuminated the city’s nights and created a new genre of nighttime cultural festival,” CEO of the Seoul Design Foundation Cha Kang-heui said. “The artists this year turn Seoul’s urban space into one of the most contemporary stages for art.”

"Seoul Light DDP" was founded in 2019, hosted by the Seoul Metropolitan Government and organized by the Seoul Design Foundation.

It won a Red Dot Design Award and Bronze IDEA Design Award in 2023, and an iF Design Award in 2025. More recently, it set a Guinness World Record for “the largest amorphous architectural 3-D projection-mapped display" on Aug. 25.

The festival attracted 1.38 million visitors in its summer and fall editions last year. This year, "Seoul Light DDP" plans to become a triennial affair, with a winter edition also planned.

BY LEE JIAN [lee.jian@joongang.co.kr]

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Media art festival 'Seoul Light DDP' illuminates Dongdaemun Design Plaza for fall edition