Embodied Copying as a Bridging Art Education Practice Across School and Museum Contexts Through Virtual Reality

Art education relies on sustained visual attention and structured acts of making, within which copying has long functioned as a foundational practice. This study examines how copying operates as an embodied art education practice when organized through immersive virtual reality (VR) within a museum setting. Thirty-five art-track students with prior school-based drawing training participated in a structured VR copying activity conducted alongside original artworks in a public art museum. Drawing on perspectives from spatial cognition, embodied perception, and immersive learning, the study examined how copying was reorganized under spatial and bodily conditions specific to VR. Questionnaire results reveal strong associations among spatial imagination, attentional involvement, motivation, and immersive engagement. Visual outputs and brief session feedback illustrate how participants reconstructed visual structure through full-body movement, spatial positioning, and three-dimensional composition while retaining core compositional relations. These findings frame embodied copying as a practice that connects school-based art training traditions with museum-based public aesthetic learning through shared spatial and perceptual organization, clarifying how copying can function across educational contexts when mediated by immersive VR.