The Monsters Are Interactive: Korean Folklore Enters the Digital Art World

BECOMING THE BEAST

Korean Folklore Comes Alive Through Interactive Digital Art

There is something irresistible about a monster that offers you its body.

Usually, we encounter creatures from a safe distance. We watch them emerge from darkness in movies, study their faces in paintings, or follow their movements through a video game. Their strangeness belongs to them. We get to remain comfortably human.

At Los Angeles’s Music Center, BEASTS invites visitors into a more intimate arrangement.

Created by artists Scarlett Kim and Anthony Storniolo, the interactive installation brings creatures inspired by Korean folklore into a world that participants help animate through their movements. It opened October 21 and runs through December 20, 2026, at the Music Center’s Digital Arts Space. Admission is free with RSVP.

The premise caught my attention as a digital artist drawn to supernatural characters: what might happen when someone gets to inhabit a creature, rather than simply look at it?

A Strange Body to Borrow

The Music Center describes a world suspended between Seoul and Los Angeles. Visitors might play hide-and-seek with a slug, dance among rat-human creatures, or explore an underwater subway station. Through movement, participants enter a beast’s story and help influence its fate.

Those encounters have the unsettling logic of dreams. Familiar activities unfold in places where the rules have changed.

A subway station already carries an atmosphere of waiting, movement, and temporary closeness to strangers. Imagine it underwater, and the setting becomes a mystery. Who belongs here? What kind of body would move comfortably through this place?

Interactive art gives those questions a physical dimension. Your gestures enter the experience. The imagined world responds, and for a moment, your body becomes part of its storytelling.

Meet the Beasts

The official BEASTS character guide offers a closer look at the creatures and the folklore behind their transformations.

The Giant Mouth appears on a Los Angeles freeway, opening a passage into the beasts’ worlds. The guide connects it to a folkloric being whose frightening appearance can give way to protection when someone dares to approach.

The Eric-Rats draw on stories of spirits wandering from sleeping bodies in rat form, with their adventures becoming the sleeper’s dreams. In the installation, these rat-human figures invite visitors into a dance celebrating the possibility of existing in multiple forms.

The Six-Part Woman offers an especially arresting interpretation. Inspired by a ghost story involving a separated body, she experiences her fragmented form as complete. Her desire is to be accepted as she is, without someone deciding she needs to be put back together.

These characters give the installation’s premise emotional weight. Each offers a different way to think about fear, recognition, and the bodies through which we experience the world.

 

Monsters Between Worlds

The Music Center frames the installation’s gwoemul through the experience of the Korean diaspora, describing identities shaped by changing combinations of bodies, cultures, and histories.

That cultural foundation gives the work something substantial to explore beneath its strange encounters.

Moving between cultures can involve continual translation. A memory that feels ordinary in one place may require an explanation elsewhere. A name, an accent, or a family tradition can make someone familiar to one community and unfamiliar to another.

To me, shapeshifting becomes a compelling artistic language for that experience. A changing body can hold several identities at once. Its contradictions can remain visible.

The Six-Part Woman is particularly interesting in that context. Her story raises a question about the expectations we bring to another person’s appearance. Who gets to decide what completeness should look like?

The Eric-Rats suggest another possibility: that multiplicity itself can be joyful. Different forms of a person might coexist without needing to compete for authenticity.

These are my interpretations of the characters’ premises, but that openness is part of their appeal. The creatures offer images through which visitors can consider their own experiences.

When a Digital Character Becomes an Encounter

As an artist, I find myself thinking about what happens after a creature’s appearance has been established.

How does it move? What gives it personality? How does someone else’s movement change the way we understand it?

A compelling character needs more than an unusual face. Its presence develops through gesture, rhythm, expression, and the relationship it forms with an audience.

Interactive work brings that relationship into the foreground. Visitors arrive with their own curiosity, hesitation, awkwardness, and humor. Someone may approach cautiously, then discover an unexpected freedom in moving through an unfamiliar body. Another person may prefer to watch others experiment.

That unpredictability interests me. The audience contributes behavior the artist cannot completely prescribe. A fictional being becomes the meeting point between a designed world and a living person.

For anyone building digital characters, that is a rich creative possibility. A figure can grow beyond its original image into an environment, a performance, or an experience people help shape.

Why We Keep Returning to Monsters

Halloween gives us an annual opportunity to experiment with identity. We exaggerate a hidden impulse, become something beautiful or disturbing, and spend an evening wearing a face we might otherwise never show.

BEASTS gives that fascination a different setting, bringing cultural memory and belonging into the act of transformation.

I keep returning to the question of what someone might discover while borrowing a creature’s body. Would they feel powerful? Vulnerable? Ridiculous? Unexpectedly at home?

A monster can make an unfamiliar experience approachable through play. Its strangeness encourages us to look closely, and that attention may reveal something recognizable.

Sometimes, the face furthest from our own is the one that gives us a new way to see ourselves.

Experience BEASTS in Los Angeles

BEASTS is on view through December 20, 2026, at the Music Center’s Digital Arts Space on Jerry Moss Plaza, 135 N. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles. The self-guided experience welcomes visitors of all ages. Admission is free with RSVP, and the installation includes strobe effects and intense lighting.

Explore BEASTS and RSVP for free admission on the Music Center’s official website.

You can also meet the creatures in the official character guide before your visit.

Choose your creature. See what it brings out in you.