Voyage


Year: 2023 - 2025 (Ongoing)

Inflatable TPU, flame-retardant fiber canvas, fluorescent acrylic, LED UV light, chip-programmed spotlight (1.5-minute light loop), sound system, aluminum frame

Size: 20 x 7 x 4.4 m 

Commissioned by: Balloon Museum

Exhibition Venues:
Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, US (March 2025) 
Brussels Expo, Brussels, Belgium (October 2024) 
Glasmacher Vierte, Düsseldorf, Germany (May 2024)
Old Billingsgate, London, UK (December 2023)

Installation Sound

Voyage is a large-scale inflatable installation created for the Balloon Museum’s touring exhibition. It presents an imaginary journey through a realm that feels at once ancient and futuristic—where the depths of the ocean meet the vastness of space, and where unknown alien lifeforms await.

At the center of the installation floats the Cosmic Dragon, a monumental inflatable creature that hovers like a divine relic in a museum of natural history. Surrounding it are ghostly translucent inflatable phantasms, shifting seamlessly between visibility and disappearance. On the walls, glowing hieroglyphs from Luminous Opera—a pictographic language invented by Kalman Pool and inspired by East Asian scripts—are revealed in Europe for the first time.

The installation is inspired by Pool’s visit to the Mogao Caves in northwestern China, a thousand-year-old Buddhist site filled with murals and celestial beings. Voyage channels this sacred energy into a contemporary, otherworldly encounter—where light, air, and language merge into a poetic cosmology.
A documentary by Thomas Line Films about the artist Kalman Pool's Voyage (2023) installation in the Emotion Air, Balloon Museum exhibition at the Old Billingsgate in Londn.Official interview by the Balloon Museum at Glasmacher Vierte, Düsseldorf, Germany (May 2024)

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