5 Cheers! at Seoul Light DDP 2024: Artists and Works

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Seoul Light DDP 2024 Winter ran from December 19 to 31, 2024, across the exterior facade of Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul. Its central program, 5 Cheers!: A Relay of Hope and Encouragement, combined five media-facade works by Recording Life, Kim Sun-woo, Joguman Studio, JE BAAK and Jean Jullien into one approximately 18-minute presentation.

Hosted by the Seoul Metropolitan Government and Seoul Design Foundation, the free program screened at DDP Oullim Square six times each evening, from 7:00 PM through 9:30 PM at 30-minute intervals. Media-art label VERSEDAY supervised the planning and production of the five works.

5 Cheers! at Seoul Light DDP 2024: Key Facts

Official event: Seoul Light DDP 2024 Winter
Program: 5 Cheers!: A Relay of Hope and Encouragement
Dates: December 19–31, 2024
Location: the exterior facade of Dongdaemun Design Plaza, viewable from DDP Oullim Square and the Design Street area
Format: five media-facade works presented as an approximately 18-minute relay
Artists: Recording Life, Kim Sun-woo, Joguman Studio, JE BAAK and Jean Jullien
Direction and production: VERSEDAY
Host and organizer: Seoul Metropolitan Government and Seoul Design Foundation
Admission: free

The event details and artist lineup are documented in the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s official program release and the Seoul Culture Portal listing.

Five Works, Five Forms of Encouragement

The title did not refer to five invented themes or freestanding installations. It described five consecutive moving-image works, each framed as a “cheer” directed toward a part of everyday life. The sequence moved through choir, theatre, magic-show imagery, claymation and performance.

Recording Life — “Cheers to Your Everyday Life!”

Recording Life opened the relay with a two-minute, 30-second choir piece. A married couple’s ordinary day is interrupted when they find themselves inside a large chorus. Their initial surprise gives way to clapping and participation before the scene returns them to daily life. The work used the unexpected performance to make the ordinary feel briefly extraordinary.

Kim Sun-woo — “Cheers to Your Dreams!”

Kim Sun-woo’s three-minute, 30-second non-verbal play centred on his recurring dodo figures. A fallen star reaches a group of flightless birds; the scene shifts as the dodos rise into the sky amid meteors, balloons and aurora-like colour. The extinct bird functions in Kim’s practice as a vehicle for dreams, possibility and freedom.

Joguman Studio — “Cheers to Your Transformation!”

Joguman Studio gave Brachio a three-minute, 30-second magic-show chapter. The character breaks through fogged glass and moves from confinement toward a new beginning. Patterns and rapidly changing scenes register the mixture of anxiety, fear, anticipation and excitement that accompanies change before Brachio sets out with friends.

JE BAAK — “Cheers to Your Smile!”

JE BAAK’s three-minute, 30-second claymation brought smiling faces and a large character across DDP’s textured surface. Seoul’s program described it as the first claymation work presented at DDP. The piece combined the physical appearance of coloured clay with computer-generated imagery, using the building as more than a neutral screen.

Jean Jullien — “Cheers to Your Relationships!”

Jean Jullien closed the sequence with a five-minute performance-inspired work. Taking a children’s festival train ride as its motif, his illustrated figures formed a procession across the facade, greeting the audience and turning movement in a line into a playful image of connection.

Why Dongdaemun Design Plaza Was Part of the Work

The presentation used a 222-metre section of DDP’s exterior rather than a conventional cinema screen. Curves, seams and changes in scale shaped how each scene travelled across the building. That made the architecture an active part of the media facade: characters could emerge, disappear and reappear along a surface already associated with Seoul’s design identity.

Large-scale character art behaves differently when it must negotiate architecture and public space. DRIFT has also examined that relationship through the KAWS:HOLIDAY Abu Dhabi waterfront installation.

VERSEDAY’s Direction and the 18-Minute Relay

VERSEDAY planned and produced the five-artist presentation, while music artist Sang Yun directed the sound. The relay format gave each participant a distinct visual language without separating the works into unrelated events. Durations of two-and-a-half, three-and-a-half, three-and-a-half, three-and-a-half and five minutes added up to the advertised 18-minute program.

The show ran six times nightly at 7:00, 7:30, 8:00, 8:30, 9:00 and 9:30 PM. It was one component of Seoul Light DDP 2024 Winter, which also included the DDP Design Market and related year-end programming.

Part of Seoul Winter Festa

Seoul Light DDP was one of six principal locations in the 2024 Seoul Winter Festa, alongside Gwanghwamun, Gwanghwamun Square, Cheonggyecheon Stream, Seoul Plaza and Bosingak Pavilion. Placing the program inside that city-wide framework gave the five works a specific function: they were a scheduled public-media program for the final weeks of 2024, not a permanent installation or an open-ended international campaign.

Organizer materials document a scheduled media-facade presentation; they do not describe audience-controlled features, external institutional partnerships, worldwide broadcasting or plans for a permanent installation.

December 31 Program Change

The Seoul Culture Portal later recorded changes to the December 31 schedule during South Korea’s national mourning period. The live countdown performances and fireworks were cancelled. The media-facade videos and countdown media facade continued with the sound substantially reduced.

That distinction matters when documenting a public event: the announced schedule and the final operating record were not identical.

Impression

The strength of 5 Cheers! was its clear structure. Five artists worked in five different modes, but every title addressed the viewer directly: everyday life, dreams, transformation, smiles and relationships. DDP’s scale allowed those compact narratives to become a single public sequence rather than five isolated clips.

The result was less an interactive technology showcase than a carefully produced media-facade anthology—one that used choir, character art, clay textures and animated procession to close 2024 with a measured relay of encouragement.