hyunjee clara ryu

concept designer for film, tv, and themed entertainment

clara hails from south korea. she likes creating playlists she’ll never listen to, doing hour-long en plein air sessions, browsing the criterion channel, and swimming even though she’s bad at it.

haunted mansion queue, disneyland resort

client: Walt Disney Imagineering

supervisor: Kim Irvine, Director of Concept Design

part of the long awaited expansion project of the beloved haunted mansion, I was responsibile for illustrating the marketing concept art used to announce the construction.

my illustration was published on the walt disney company’s park-affliiated instagram accounts and the offiical disneyparks blog.

the illustration was also printed in large scale and hanged on the construction walls for the haunted mansion queue for a year in 2024.

the masquerade of

mirrors

a dreamscape trapped in stories

one thousand and one nights

part 1. scheherezade and king shahryar

one thousand and one nights is an anthology of middle eastern tales more commonly known as the arabian nights. I am interested in portraying a fairy tale that appears happy at first glance, but is in reality unfortunate. The audience will be taken into a dynamic journey that spans across multiple tales with the royal blue colour of the king’s chamber seeping through her warm, fictional world.

one thousand and one nights is a story about a woman who is objectified as amere plaything that constantlytries to escape her fate through her imagination, yet fails to do so. scheherazade is brought into tell stories to king shahryar, only to face the fate and fear of becoming beheaded the next day after betrothal. to save her own life, she must keep him entertained, and she starts telling her stories.

part 2. the merchant and the jinri

ext. bazaar

part 3. the city of brass

part 4. sinbad's adventures

ext. the whale island

part 5. ali baba and the forty thieves

ext. the treasure cavern

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barton fink

the main inspiration for the exterior of Hotel Earle will be the Cecil Hotel. though there are many historic hotel buildings in Los Angeles, most of them are inspired by the Beaux Arts tradition, which I do not believe is suitable to the descriptions of the hotel that the script provides.

for the interior, I will take inspiration from the lobby of Hotel Roosevelt, because despite its Spanish Renaissance Revival style, the colonnade structure provides a weird sense of both an open and closed space, which I believe is essential to my design.

int. hotel earle lobby

when we are stuck in a creative block, there are no walls or definition that provides a glimpse of a hint into what may become a storyline; there is only nothingness. My challenge is to create a space that is true to the period while accentuating that suffocating nature of an emptiness that seems to point to no visible way out.