Jinjoon Lee: Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom
19th September, 2025 – 21st September, 2025
Bundang Central Park Outdoor Stage, Seongnam, Korea
Free admission to the public
In Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom, media artist Jinjoon Lee transforms a South Korean woodland into an AI-driven open-air theatre of sound, light and myth.
Jinjoon Lee, the internationally recognised media artist who once sent K-pop star G-Dragon’s voice into outer space, is preparing to stage what he describes as the world’s first large-scale, AI-driven media performance.
The project, Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom, will transform Bundang Central Park’s outdoor stage into an immersive open-air theatre from 19 to 21 September 2025. Admission is free.
Lee, who calls himself a “Data Gardenist,” is known for blending biometric data, performance and large-scale projections. His earlier collaboration with G-Dragon, Good Morning Mr. G-Dragon, fused the musician’s voice and music with a projection-mapped exploration of human emotion. The new performance extends those experiments, using 16 ultra-high-resolution projectors — the same technology deployed at Olympic opening ceremonies — alongside AI-driven sound, lasers, fog and sensors to animate 200 metres of living forest.
(Courtesy of Jinjoon Lee Studio)
At the heart of the work is what Lee calls a “media symphony” of woodland, city and audience. The narrative opens with a fable about “a giant who became a star,” drawing on mythic figures such as Pangu and Prometheus. A layered soundscape combines a live 70-piece orchestra, a 1,000-voice citizens’ choir, and AI-generated harmonies. Algorithms recompose field recordings of the forest, weaving them with variations on familiar film soundtracks to create music that shifts with both the landscape and the audience’s movements.
“Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom is more than a performance to witness; it’s an invitation to linger and stroll,” Lee said. “It realises augmented empathy where every act of walking and breathing is woven into the narrative, and where nature and the city, technology and humans coexist organically.”
Running in tandem with the performance is Lee’s solo exhibition Champagne Supernova in Seoul, which includes Nine Reincarnation, a new series of AI-generated hybrid collages. Together, the two projects present a broad view of his practice, which often explores the thresholds of time, space and memory.
(Courtesy of Jinjoon Lee Studio)
The artist describes the Bundang performance as an inquiry into the evolving relationship between artificial intelligence and human creativity. Later this month, on 27 September, he will expand on these questions in a public conversation with Biao Xiang, director of the Max Planck Institute, in Guangzhou.
Like a landscape painting unfolding across screens of mist, light and sound, Lee’s forest theatre seeks to blur the line between everyday terrain and imagined worlds — part city, part wilderness, and part dream.
Jinjoon Lee: Cine-Forest: Awakening Bloom opens on the 19th of September, 2025 until the 21st of September, 2025 at Bundang Central Park Outdoor Stage, Seongnam, Korea
©2025 Jinjoon Lee
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