Heritage Art Link

A WebXR point-cloud exhibition of Korean Nongak heritage

About the exhibition

Heritage Art Link is a browser-based exhibition that preserves the motion of Nongak — Korean community farmers' music, dance, and ritual, inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2014 — as three-dimensional light. Thirty-seven performances were recorded with Kinect depth sensors, and each captured movement is rendered as a point-cloud sculpture: thousands of luminous points tracing a drummer's spin, a dancer's leap, the flick of a sangmo streamer.

Visitors walk among the 37 motion sculptures arranged in a great ring inside a virtual heritage hall, on any device — desktop browser, phone, or fully immersive VR and AR headsets through WebXR. The exhibition unfolds in phases: an approach through a hanok gate, the main ring where each sculpture performs its recorded motion in place, and a finale in which the archive coalesces — visitors can select individual performances, scrub through their timelines, and read bilingual captions describing each heritage motion.

The work is participatory: in the finale's void, visitors' interactions leave sediment — accumulating traces shared in real time between everyone present — and coalesced sculptures can be archived and shared by link, each one a visitor-made record of the encounter between heritage motion and digital space.

Why Nongak, why point clouds

Intangible heritage lives in bodies, not objects. When a performance ends, what remains is memory and notation — neither of which carries the weight, speed, and volume of a moving body. Depth-camera capture holds onto exactly that: not an image of the performer, but the spatial fact of the movement itself. Rendering these recordings as point clouds is a deliberate choice — the figure is present but porous, luminous but incomplete, the way transmitted tradition itself is: carried forward, always partially, by each new body that learns it.

Technology

• Motion capture: Microsoft Kinect depth sensing, 37 recorded performances
• Rendering: WebGL point clouds (Three.js / React Three Fiber), GPU skinning
• Immersion: WebXR — VR and AR sessions on supporting headsets and phones
• Captions: bilingual (Korean/English) heritage descriptions with AI-assisted translation
• Shared presence: realtime sediment traces between concurrent visitors

This work includes AI-generated imagery, disclosed in accordance with Korean AI-content transparency guidance.

Sound credit

About the artist

Daha Kim (김다하) is a Korean digital media artist, writer, and artistic researcher whose practice examines how data, digital media, and cultural heritage translate into physical and formative experience. Recent solo exhibitions include The Physical Translation of Data: An Experiment in the Formative Qualities of Deposition and Text (Chungjang22, Gwangju, 2026) and Research on Digital Media Art (and Cultural Heritage); Deconstruction of Boundaries and Fluidity (Commons Field Daejeon, 2026). Selected group exhibitions include Breathing with the Chaos: Berlin Edition (P61 Gallery, Berlin, 2026), NFT R.I.P. (Uncommon Gallery, Seoul, 2025), and the Digital Art Culture Lab Showcase Orbit of Light (Gwangju Media Art Platform, 2025). Kim also writes exhibition criticism, including commissioned reviews for the Korean Cultural Centre UK and Gwangju Media Art Platform's art-writing program, published on Aliceon.

More writing and exhibition records: blog.dahakimlab.com · Contact: artistdahakim@gmail.com