How to Build a Star in Your Front Yard

January 5, 2016, 1:20pm

Late last year, a captivating star-shaped installation fell from artist Jun Hao Ong‘s imagination onto—or rather into—a building in Malaysia. That same idea fell into South Korean artist Viktor Jan’s head, and in just a few months he has replicated it in the front yard of a cafe called Common Ground in Seoul. Common Ground often commissions artwork, and Jan’s experience with a variety of art forms in London and Seoul earned him the chance to reimagine a fallen star on their property.

The site specific nature of Ong’s The Star was part of its beauty, interwoven into the building like a spider web. Common Ground is already an architecturally innovative space, constructed from three stories of stacked shipping containers, which helps Jan to capture the same captivating, web-like feel in his sculpture, Starlight. In the video below, he weaves steel cables and LEDs between Common Ground’s iconic blue walls for a final product as captivating as the first. “The installation creates a surreal atmosphere by the literal expression of metaphor ‘plucking a star from the sky,’” Jan writes in his video’s description.