Have you ever fancied the idea of time-traveling? Being able to go back to a different era, for example, and being able to glimpse what it might have been like to see life through the eyes of your favourite historical painters? Seeing how people dressed, seeing the streets they walked down, the atmosphere that surrounded them… Now there is an experience in Hong Kong that allows you to do just that.
It’s an immersive, 360 degrees, 1:1 scale virtual reality event that takes you to Paris in the year 1874, where photographer Félix Nadar — the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon — hosted the first-ever show by a group of painters that are known today as the Impressionists. The setting has been meticulously reconstructed to be exactly how scholars believe it was like on that day. All of the painters that took part in the opening are present and vividly recreated as they talk, roam and admire each other’s paintings. 
And as if that isn’t intriguing enough, this same experience will also take you along the Seine to a place outside of Paris called La Grenoullière, where the Impressionists would go to paint en plein air, quickly moving their brushes on the canvas in order to capture the changing light just at their desired moment. After this, you are taken to Le Havre, the city in Normandy where Claude Monet painted “Impressions, Sunrise” in 1872, which gave the name to the whole movement. They reached these places by boarding a train from Saint-Lazare station – and that too is fully recreated in the VR experience.
The first step to this journey back in time is to reach the Hong Kong Design Institute in Tseung Kwan O, where you can put on a VR headset and marvel at the 42-minute experience, aptly called Tonight With the Impressionists, Paris 1874. It’s the brainchild of a French group called Gedeon that also produces documentaries on history and archaeology. The company branched into immersive exhibitions and experiences five years ago. “We always start from a very strong topic and we start to think of how we can really make it shine,” says Alizé Lecuivre, development officer at Gedeon Experiences. The company collaborates with architects, historians and 3D experts. Among the long-vanished places it has depicted is Pompeii, the Roman city destroyed by a volcanic eruption in the year 79.
That ensures a level of accuracy that makes the experiences feel dizzyingly real. In Tonight With the Impressionists, 19th century Paris is so precise that you can look around, tilt your head down the major avenues and see them in perspective, or turn back to observe people sitting in a café, while chatting and drinking refreshments. You are no longer in Hong Kong. All around you is another time and another place, during a lovely springtime afternoon as it turns slowly to dusk. 
When you first put on your headset, you are met by a character called Rose, a model and aspiring writer, who acts as a guide to the experience, explaining exactly where you are, what is happening around you, and taking you through the streets of central Paris, making sure you do not get run over by (virtual) horse carts. You are about to visit the historical exhibition at the Nadar’s atelier, which took place in mid-April, and as you walk around, fluffy clouds and little birds are flying in the sky.
Maybe you want to linger and marvel a bit longer, but Rose calls you inside the photographer’s studio, on the boulevard des Capucines, where you can meet Paul Cézanne, Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot (the only woman part of the movement), Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, and even the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who played a crucial role in supporting these artists at a time when they were not yet world famous, but rather ostracised and occasionally ridiculed for their audacity. The only major name that was missing was Édouard Manet, who had not wished to take part in the exhibition, as he felt reluctant to be pigeonholed into one movement. 
Today they are renowned, but when the exhibition was held, the Impressionists had all been rejected by the official Academy of Arts for what it considered to be an excessively innovative approach to figurative painting. It was thanks only to more open minded patrons in Europe and the United States that they managed to support themselves and bring about an artistic revolution that changed the art world forever. (Manet was also not too convinced about breaking off with the Academy, and while he is today considered an Impressionist, he never embraced the movement with total abandon, as some of his peers did.)
As France, and the world, were getting ready to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Nadar’s exhibition, Gedeon decided to reproduce the exact place in which it happened. Even if the show was held in a photographer’s studio, there are no photographic images of that event, so the team behind Tonight with the Impressionists started to collect all the information they could. “We investigated for two years, looking at aerial photos, land registry documents, archives, and the letters that the painters themselves exchanged, lifting out all the physical descriptions we could find,” says Lecuivre.
Once all the details were laid out, Gedeon approached Paris’ Musée d’Orsay to collaborate on the project. The museum got on board immediately, contributing one of its exhibition halls for the VR experience, and adding the knowledge of its curators and experts to the meticulous research that had been put together by Gedeon. Atelier Sylvain Roca took charge of the scenography. “I know it sounds strange to say we designed the VR space,” says founder Sylvain Roca, “but it is a necessity – we need to structure the itinerary that people are going to follow, even if they are physically moving in one large room, they experience something much more structured, and it is important to design a coherent flow for that.”
None of this would have been possible without technology developed by VR company Excurio, which allows up to 100 people to walk around a single area with their headsets on, making it possible for a large number of visitors to enjoy the VR experience simultaneously. When it opened at the Musée d’Orsay from March to July 2024, more than 80,000 people attended Evening with the Impressionists.
Before starting the VR experience itself, visitors have access to a pre-show room, where they can learn further details from a short documentary and a precise map of 1874 Paris. For the Hong Kong exhibition, Roca has also installed a Painters Gallery where visitors can find extra information on the main Impressionists painters represented in the VR experience. Another documentary, which can be viewed at the end of the experience, illustrates some of the more technical aspects of what we have just been through.
The artists that you see in Nader’s studio — not to mention Rose, the guide — are all made possible by actors who have recorded scenes while wearing black body suits studded with reflective foam balls. A set of cameras recorded their movements, with infrared signals tracking the balls to trace even the slightest of movements. All of this information is then processed by computer, retaining the silhouettes of the actors and filling in the details of the virtual characters visible in the immersive experience. As you wear the VR headset, a processor tracks your position and movement, sending you warnings if you are about to bump into the wall or another exhibition visitor.
Roca and Lecuivre both note that 42 minutes is long for a VR experience – but time flies as you experience Paris, La Grenouillère, Le Havre and Saint-Lazare station. It takes a few more minutes to reorient yourself once you remove the headset. You’re back in Tseung Kwan O, no longer eavesdropping on the Impressionists’ conversations; Rose is no longer guiding us through a time gone by, one that has left such a strong imprint on our history and aesthetics.
Tonight with the Impressionists runs until 11 May 2025 at HKSI. For more information visit here.