Shinsegae Duty Free turned the greeting 'Annyeong' into media art across Seoul

Shinsegae Duty Free's K-Reflection cultural arts initiative reinterprets Korean culture through contemporary media art. For Hangul Day 2026 it commissioned a new work that could speak to both Seoul residents and international travelers with no Korean.

Hong In-sook's Hangul word annyeong rebuilt as a 3D landscape of peonies and waterfalls from elements of 20+ of her paintings, projected at city scale.

Studio Artech turned Hong In-sook's paintings into three-dimensional digital content using anamorphic techniques matched to each building. From October 1, 2026 the work ran at Shinsegae Duty Free Myeongdong's Iconic Zone (to November 30), the roughly 3,000-square-metre LUUX screen at the Dong-A Media Center in Gwanghwamun (to October 31) and Artium in Samseong-dong (to October 14). A QR code opened nodnod.io, an AI exhibition guide by culture-tech company DOSN that answers questions in multiple languages with no app install; from October 9 visitors could also photograph themselves against the artwork's backdrop.

The work ran across three major Seoul media facades for up to two months, including one of Korea's largest digital signage installations; no visitor or engagement figures were disclosed in the announcement.

In a PR Newswire release dated October 8, 2026, Shinsegae Duty Free announced Annyeong on Hanji, a digital media artwork created with Korean artist Hong In-sook for Hangul Day (October 9), presented under its K-Reflection cultural arts initiative. The work takes the Korean greeting annyeong — a word the release describes as carrying wishes for peace and well-being — and rebuilds it as a visual landscape of blooming white peonies and cascading blue waterfalls.

Hong In-sook's practice treats the visual structure of Hangul as an artistic language. For this piece, elements drawn from more than 20 of her earlier works — pine trees, phoenixes, tigers, swallows, clouds and flowers — were layered into a three-dimensional landscape. The white peonies carry a stated meaning: white light is the combination of all colors, standing for the efforts of the people who preserved Korea's written language.

Studio Artech converted the paintings into digital content with anamorphic techniques extended to the scale of each facade, and the work appeared from October 1, 2026 at Shinsegae's Myeongdong Iconic Zone, the LUUX screen at Gwanghwamun's Dong-A Media Center (about 3,000 square metres) and Artium in Samseong-dong.

Recognizing that many viewers cannot read Hangul, the retailer paired the work with a multilingual AI guide: a QR code opens nodnod.io, built with culture-tech company DOSN, letting visitors ask about the work in their own language. Annyeong on Hanji follows earlier K-Reflection presentations — Eureka! with the Yeongin Literary Museum and Tiger, Roar! at the Myeongdong facade in September, a program run with the National Museum of Korea since 2022. Hong In-sook's works have been shown at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Seoul Museum of Art and the Seoul Arts Center.

The choice of subject does double duty: annyeong is a greeting every visitor hears on arrival, so the artwork needs no translation to land emotionally.

Anamorphic 3D treatment on three different buildings shows the work was designed for the city's architecture, not resized from one master file.

The AI guide solves the real accessibility problem of showing calligraphy-based art to tourists — without demanding an app download.

A retailer's media wall can carry culture instead of offers: commissioning an artist whose language is already distinctive turns screens people ignore into something a city looks up at.

The announcement says Shinsegae Duty Free will continue reinterpreting Korean culture and art through new formats and developing public cultural projects for wider audiences under K-Reflection. The installations ran on their stated schedules through October and November 2026; no attendance or media-impact figures were released.