Experiencing the Past through Futuristic Technology

INSIGHT

by PAUL CARVER A member of the Editorial Board of National Museum of Korea, quarterly magazine

At the National Museum of Korea it has become more common to run into foreign visitors who want close contact with Korean culture and learn about it, from tourists here for a short visit to foreign residents of Korea. Here we introduce the varied stories of people who are learning about Korea’s history and culture and share their interest in and perception of the National Museum of Korea.

My relationship with archaeology and museums has, I suspect, much in common with many others of my generation from the UK. As children we were excited by the idea of archaeology while watching the derring-do of Indiana Jones eating monkey brains; as callow youths we were herded round various local and landmark museums on school trips, languidly filling in worksheets with answers copied from dusty exhibits; as university students we recovered from the excess of Saturday night in the student union; combating our hangovers with the soothing tones of Tony Robinson as he introduced another archaeological dig on Time Team and enjoying a bacon sandwich for Sunday tea; and as adults we finally learned to appreciate museums as a way to get an extraordinarily deep cultural introduction to a new place or subject at an often very reasonable cost.

Now I have children of my own and can see them going through the same cycle themselves. As children, there was a brief period after watching the movie Night at the Museum when they were keen to visit museums but currently they are at the bored teenager stage. Nevertheless I appreciate the fact that museums are much more accessible to children and young adults today than they were 30 years ago when I was young.

The advent of digital technology has certainly been helpful with that. However, it still requires a certain level of foresight and creativity from museum administrators to use technology effectively to bring exhibits out from behind the one-inch thick glass that although protects precious artifacts from our grubby mitts also acts as a barrier to our ability to interact with and relate to history.

That is why I was so impressed with the mobile exhibits in the Children’s Museum at the National Museum of Korea. What looks like a simple box unfolds into a dynamic hands-on display with lots of bells and whistles that enables the children to almost become a part of the history that they are studying. The exhibit contains costumes, dioramas, puzzles, and explanations about the historical context from a digital docent. Moreover, since it can be packed up into a box on wheels it can be easily transported to schools as part of a history roadshow so that even school children living far from the museum can learn about the key eras of Korean history.

Another recent exhibit, The Science of Light, Revealing the Secrets of Cultural Properties, that I particularly enjoyed was one demonstrating how the museum uses technology to view artifacts to a degree beyond what is visible to the naked eye. Of course many exhibits are visually stunning in their own right but when bombarded with different frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum many artifacts give up secrets that were previously hidden from view. X-rays revealed what was beneath the gilded patina of a gold Buddha as well as hidden chambers in an intricate inkwell and the technology ensuring that a unique rice wine cup would never overflow. Additionally, the use of ultra-violet light and infrared rays on parchments and paintings revealed previously invisible details such as faded motifs and words as well as enabling researchers to determine the original colours that they were painted in. This exhibit not only used technology to deepen researchers’ understanding of history but also used it to present it to us laymen by using digital overlays of items in their original resplendent glory and visualizations of how things worked with the outer casing stripped away.

A display for the special exhibition The Science of Light: Revealing the Secrets of Cultural Properties

Videos on a giant panoramic screen 60 meters wide and 5 meters high, covering three sides in the second room of Immersive Digital Gallery 1

The National Museum of Korea is like a living being with a public persona that is visible to everyone but also with many processes happening in the background to keep its figurative heart beating and lungs breathing and it is always fun to find out more about what is happening just out of sight.

Making things relatable to the average museum-goer is one of the things that the National Museum of Korea does particularly well. I can recall a temporary exhibition, The story of History through Hangeul, to celebrate the invention of the Korean Hangeul alphabet almost 600 years ago where exhibits and explanations were presented in the style of modern online reviews showing the juxtaposition of modernity and history and the development of language over the course of history as well as presenting information in a way that is familiar and easily digestible by those who are used to today’s fast-paced modern world of information being disseminated in short soundbites.

Reacting to and adapting to trends in society is important for maintaining relevance in a world where museums risk being sidelined as consumers have a plethora of entertainment choices and I can see that the National Museum of Korea is trying hard to move past the stuffy, staid image of most museums and encourage people to swipe right. That is why the museum is rightly proud of its newly developed immersive digital galleries where visitors can see digital projections of famous Korean paintings, visualizations of scenes from Joseon life, and interpretations of the inside of a Goguryeo tomb located in North Korea. The museum has also introduced multilingual robot docents named QI who give information in four different languages about the museum itself, ongoing exhibitions as well as explanations of key exhibits and to whom you can even ask questions. Finally, there are also various virtual reality experiences available including two that go behind the scenes at the museum to visit the conservation centre and the storage, respectively.

These particular videos were a highlight for me because I am aware that museums, like airports, have numerous operations, projects, and workers behind the scenes. The exhibits and displays that we see are just a fraction of the whole of what is going on. In this respect, the museum is like a living being with a public persona that is visible to everyone but also with many processes happening in the background to keep its figurative heart beating and lungs breathing and it is always fun to find out more about what is happening just out of sight.

With this in mind I hope the museum will at some point have an exhibition showing the nitty-gritty of archaeological digs in Korea including any accidental finds of unique cultural relics. There are semi-frequent reports in UK newspapers of farmers discovering roman artifacts while plowing fields and hobbyists finding hoards of gold coins with their metal detectors. I know detectoring is not a common hobby in Korea but I would assume that occasionally similar events do occur in Korea and it would be interesting to see exhibits about such occurrences and information about ongoing official archaeological digs as well as the process an artifact goes through from when it is discovered in the ground to taking pride of place as the key display of a new exhibition.

The writer first visited Korea in 1992 on a family holiday and developed a bond with it while occasionally visiting Korea during his undergraduate studies in the UK. He took a Master’s Degree at the Graduate School of International Studies at Yonsei University and then was qualified as a chartered accountant in the UK. He has lived and worked in Korea since 2007.