Genesis brought Korea's guardian beast to London as an AR mural for the V&A's Hallyu show

The Korean luxury car brand wanted its V&A sponsorship to celebrate Korean heritage in the street, not just on a logo wall, as London hosted its first big Hallyu exhibition.

Genesis worked with Innocean Berlin and renowned Korean artist Joonho Brian Ko to paint the Haechi mural in London, filled with the motifs and stories explored in the exhibition; a QR code on the wall opened an AR experience on the visitor's phone.

The mural became the street-level face of the partnership; the V&A's head of partnerships called Genesis 'the perfect partner' for the museum's first major exhibition focused on South Korean popular culture. No reach or engagement figures are given in the source.

In May 2023, Korean luxury car brand Genesis was a sponsor and partner of the V&A's 'Hallyu! The Korean Wave' exhibition in London, the museum's first major show dedicated to South Korean popular culture. Rather than a standard sponsorship placement, Genesis commissioned a large street-art mural in the city.

Genesis collaborated with its agency Innocean Berlin and the renowned Korean artist Joonho Brian Ko. The mural takes the form of Haechi, the mythical Korean creature that wards off bad omens, and inside it sits a constellation of Korean motifs, symbols and stories — many of them themes explored in the V&A exhibition itself.

A QR code on the mural guides viewers to an augmented-reality experience, a nod to the ever-changing nature of the Korean wave. Innocean Berlin's chief creative officer Gabriel Mattar framed the work as tribute from an agency with Korean roots and more than 30 nationalities: 'our way of giving something back to Korea and its rich cultural wave.'

Most car-brand sponsorships stop at logo placement; Genesis instead commissioned an original artwork fused with the exhibition's own subject matter.

The Haechi is a precise symbol choice — a guardian against bad omens that lets a car brand borrow cultural protection rather than push product features.

The QR-to-AR layer makes the mural a repeatable scanning experience instead of a one-look poster, tying street art to the 'ever-changing' Korean wave the show celebrates.

The V&A's partnerships lead publicly framed Genesis as 'the perfect partner', showing the artefact did sponsorship work a media buy could not.

A sponsor that builds its own cultural artefact around the show earns more attention than one that buys naming rights — pick the symbol your home culture already owns and put it on the street.

The mural supported the Hallyu! The Korean Wave exhibition during its 2023 run. The source records no follow-up results, copies or awards; the partnership quotes from the V&A and Genesis remain the main documented outcome.