Antony Gormley: Ground On the artist's installation at Museum San, Wonju

The British artist Antony Gormley made his name designing sculptures that fit seamlessly into their surroundings.

He installed dozens of life-size figures on a beach, where some are swallowed by the surf every few hours. Others stand in farm fields or on city rooftops, staring mutely back at us as abstract meditations on how we relate to our environment.

But Gormley, 75, took a different approach for his latest big installation. Instead of designing sculptures for an existing landscape, he worked with an award-winning architect to create a new home for them: an underground art cave inspired by a 2,000-year-old Roman dome.

“It was a bit cheeky, in a way,” Gormley said of his ambitious proposal for the installation at Museum San, a campus of minimalist concrete buildings set among pine forests in Wonju, South Korea.