Following OMA’s exhibition designs for Dior: From Paris to the World at the Denver Art Museum (2018) and Dallas Museum of Art (2019), and Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2022), the Seoul exhibition Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) aims to highlight over 70 years of Maison Dior’s creative history and Korea’s cultural heritage.
OMA Partner Shohei Shigematsu said, “We are thrilled to bring a new experience of Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams to Seoul, incorporating elements from the rich cultural context of Korea to the design. With no rooms or walls, DDP’s Art Hall and its vast, open expanse gave us carte blanche to expand on our scenographic approach conceptually and spatially. Thematic rooms are playfully scaled and shaped to create a rhythmic journey. Smaller, intimate rooms lead into oversized scenes – walking on a Parisian street, inside a skirt or a jar, a tunneling cabinet, lost in an infinite archive, stepping into a surreal spiral stair – enveloping the viewer in the world of Dior.”
Within DDP’s Art Hall 1, the exhibition presents a unified narrative composition drawing from the spatial logic of traditional Korean hanok1. The exhibition orbits around a large central space, “The Garden”, serving as the madang2. As smaller galleries unfold around – “The Garden” – the shape, color, materiality, and texture that govern each room create a rhythmic procession – alternating organic and orthogonal, light and dark, monochrome to colorful, soft and hard.
Korean cultural references are embedded throughout the exhibition as conceptual and structural devices. “The Garden” is imagined as a large-scale, inhabitable moon jar3 – its form a reference to the porcelain vessel created by separately throwing, then joining, hemispherical halves. Inside the 12-meter-tall vessel, a dynamic projected dome meets a textured hanji4 forest landscape by the artist Hyun Joo Kim.
Key thematic rooms carry forward this resonance, by decoding objects of cultural significance into spatial and display armatures. “Dior Legacy” traces the timeline of the House’s creative directors with a single, curvilinear ribbon made using the textile technique of jogakbo5—highlighting individual eras while suggesting their continuous relationship. The “Lady Dior” takes cues from traditional red lacquerware cabinetry, using repeated modules to form a sculptural and immersive display.
In other rooms, new display strategies and materiality are introduced to expand the engagement between viewer and display, and the dialogue between objects themselves. Layered scrims, mirrored louvers, suspended toiles, and metal cables are shaped to offer multiple perspectives of garments, artworks, and artifacts. The resulting transparency, openness, and reflections create unique dialogues between the objects on display, reinforcing the multi-faceted and ever evolving history of Dior.
1 Hanok (한옥) – traditional, wood-framed houses with ceramic roof tiles and regionally varying layouts
2 Madang (마당) – the hanok’s open-air courtyard, which connects its rooms and often serves a social function
3 Moon jar (달항아리) – porcelain vessel from the Joseon period that is made from two halves and evokes the full moon
4 Hanji (한지) – handmade paper made from mulberry bark and known for its strength and durability
5 Jogakbo (조각보) – traditional domestic wrapping cloth made in a patchwork style with scraps of leftover fabric
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Press release and photos Courtesy OMA
Installation photography: Photography by Kyungsub Shin
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