Heemin Chung and Alvaro Barrington Miniature BMW i7 arrives in Frieze Seoul as art cars inspired by video games, bats and insects

Artists Heemin Chung and Alvaro Barrington interpret the BMW i7 as miniature art cars at Frieze Seoul, which runs from September 4th to 7th, 2024. Inspired by the BMW Art Car Collection and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artists paint over seven miniature i7s, drawing inspiration from video games and the movement of birds, bats, and insects. During the event in Korea, BMW also showcases Julie Mehretu’s BMW Art Car #20, marking its Asian debut after being unveiled in Paris in May 2024.

While the brief is flexible, the artists focus on human-centered design and technological innovation as their artistic themes. Their miniature BMW i7s become a medium that highlights how people can interact with the real-life model, while also emphasizing its tech features without losing the artists’ personal flair in the process. As a nod to the i7 name, Heemin Chung and Alvaro Barrington both create seven miniature art cars, all showcased at Frieze in Seoul, an event with which BMW has been a long-term global partner since 2004.

Korean artist Heemin Chung wants to translate digital images into the physical world through paintings and sculptures. She’s interested in objects that people can touch and see in real life, rather than just being projected onto a screen, whether animated or immobile. This is how she approached her miniature BMW i7 art cars for Frieze Seoul. She taps into designers’ early days, when they turned to nature for design inspiration. It’s a sort of back-to-the-drawing-board approach, and in her case, the beginning starts with the way birds, bats, and insects move.

Ornithopters fascinate Heemin Chung. These are experimental flying machines meant to replicate the flight of birds or insects, an idea that stemmed from devising a device that could fly like them. The experiments may have failed, but they’ve found success on the Korean artist’s vision board. Her BMW i7 miniatures grow legs, arms, and torsos, as if they’ve come alive like car creatures. The artist resonates with the idea of ‘tech magic,’ a term that BMW has used to describe the wonder people feel when encountering advanced technology. It’s modern magic for Heemin Chung, at least in the way her miniature BMW i7s seem to animate to life, reaching out to viewers with their limbs.

Moving away from ornithopters, Alvaro Barrington attempts to link cultural histories together. In his art practice, he uses burlap, textiles, postcards, and clothing, to name a few, to create his art. For the London-based artist, these materials can convey messages. He instills them historical, personal, political, or commercial notes into what he makes. At Frieze Seoul, it’s a bit more personal for him and his miniature BMW i7 art cars. He’s a fan of video games, and using them as the basis of his art cars isn’t by accident. He sees video games as both sources of entertainment and harbingers of cultural resets, especially with their use of music and historical and pop references.

His work with BMW considers video games as references painted onto the miniature BMW i7s. They resemble the graffiti-tagged vehicles in driving games. Each of these cars features a drawing inspired by a film, a music video, or a cultural figure. These references are important to Alvaro Barrington because, in several ways, the figures he painted have influenced his art practice.