Korean beauty brand Sulwhasoo's Beauty From Your Culture campaign works with UNESCO to preserve local heritage.
Imagine this: It’s a bright sunny day, a gentle breeze is rustling through the leaves, and you’re walking through a lightly forested area of the park. As you turn the corner, you spot a strange sight. A bush of vibrant gnarled wires blocks your progress, each metal thread intimately entwined with its brethren to form a sparse web, standing as high as you are tall.
The earth under the wires is disturbed, as though something has been uprooted from its depths. Then, you notice that the wires are attached to a felled metal lamppost, whose elongated body rests just beyond their colourful tangle. In a space surrounded by strategically-placed trees and well-trodden paths, this is a strange sight indeed. This, the guide tells you, is Mirage, the art piece created by Korean artist Kim Myeongbeom.
As you might have guessed, the fallen lamppost in the park is not a coincidence; no lamppost existed there before, and Kim Myeongbeom is no guerilla artist. Mirage is one of 12 artistic works that have been commissioned by Korean beauty brand Sulwhasoo as part of their annual Sulwha Cultural Exhibition. The exhibition is intended to enrich the cultural landscape of Korea—Sulwhasoo’s way of giving back to the community and creating more beauty in the world. Each year, artists from different disciplines are asked to create pieces around a certain theme. For 2017, that theme is an old Korean fairytale called A Fairy and A Woodcutter, seen through modern eyes.
2017 also marks the first year in which Sulwhasoo is extending this cultural proliferation programme outside of Korea. The Beauty From Your Culture campaign sees artists from the Sulwha Cultural Exhibition designing two limited edition skincare sets, some of the profits of which will be donated to preserving local cultural heritage. In Singapore, that site is the Singapore Botanic Gardens, our own UNESCO heritage site.
(Related: Sulwhasoo Brings A New Level Of Luxury To Cushion Foundations)