The poetic art of Jakob Kudsk Steensen

By J.U-S.

OUTSIDE THE Serpentine Sackler Gallery, a film on a giant screen transports the viewer from the confines of London to the vast landscapes of the American Sublime. “Catharsis” is the work of Jakob Kudsk Steensen, a young tech-savvy Danish artist, who last year armed visitors to Kensington Gardens with an augmented-reality app that let them experience its bats and parakeets close-up. Now he is back with a powerfully immersive virtual forest, thanks to patronage from an unconventional quarter: BTS, a K-Pop boyband that has become a global phenomenon.

Formed in 2012 and now thought to contribute $4.65bn annually to South Korea’s economy, BTS are the first band since the Beatles to have three number-one albums on the American Billboard charts in a year. Their move this month into the art world, in a project known as Connect BTS, is the brainchild of Daehyung Lee, their art director, who aims to widen the band’s horizons. The curator of the Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, Mr Lee also sees that contemporary artists could benefit from a broader audience.

Under a darkening sky, Mr Kudsk Steensen’s installation looks glorious, the burnished tones of the Californian redwoods luminous and shimmering. The landscape envelops viewers, plunging them down among bright fish in a fast-flowing stream, then up and up for an eagle’s view of sunlit glades and bald mountains. Working with Matt McCorkle, a sound engineer from the Natural History Museum in New York, the artist has brought together images from three different American forests, before adding some computer-generated magic.

Mr Kudsk Steensen spends long periods in the field with biologists, drawing inspiration from nature. You might assume that “Catharsis” is primarily about saving the planet, but this artist is more Romantic poet than activist. “There is a climate dimension,” he says. “But for me ‘Catharsis’ is about slowing down time in the noisy times we live in: the feeling of doing that is the main purpose, rather than, say, the preservation of redwood forests.”

Similarly, “Re-animated” (2019), an installation inspired by an ornithologist who spent 40 years studying the mating call of a bird that ultimately became extinct, is a reflection on coping with disappearance and death. “I try to make my work about something else—not just the place in nature that I draw the main inspiration from.”

With a background in games development, Mr Kudsk Steensen has settled into creating virtual landscapes. Technology is inseparable from his art. That makes him a good fit for the Serpentine, which encourages artistic experiments with artificial intelligence and augmented reality. Its approach in these fields is to pin down a proposal with an artist, then put together a specialist tech team and, unusually for such an institution, build the work inhouse. “We are trying to shift the way we understand artistic production,” says Ben Vickers, the museum’s chief technology officer.

“Catharsis” is one of a series of Connect BTS art projects taking place around the world, this month and next, all free to the public. Online versions reach out to a wider audience. Tomas Saraceno is floating a solar-powered balloon over the Salinas Grandes in his native Argentina; in New York Antony Gormley aims to “draw in space” with 18km of aluminium tubing; and Yiyun Kang, a Korean artist, will digitally reimagine BTS’s signature dance movements in Seoul.

The band, whose popularity derives from their gentle inclusiveness and focus on the troubles of youth, appeared via a live video link at the Serpentine for the launch of Connect BTS, disarming cynics with their straightforwardness. Contemporary art is clearly a new discovery for them, and they are eager for their millions of mainly teenage fans—known as the “Army”—to discover it, too.

Many had already been interrogating Mr Kudsk Steensen by email, and an hour after the launch some of the London cohort turned up in person to ask “very engaged questions” (“more than I’d get from a usual museum audience,” he says). For the Serpentine, pushing technology as a medium as it celebrates its 50th year, Mr Kudsk Steensen is an ideal artist. And the emergence of a K-Pop band as new patrons of the arts? For Mr Vickers, that is “a beautiful science-fiction proposal”.

“Catharsis” runs as an outdoor installation until March 15th and can be accessed online at catharsis.live