The waiting room hasn't seen a patient in years. On a recent afternoon, visitors moved through it slowly anyway — as if unsure what they might find inside themselves.

A prescription for feeling

That is more or less the point of Hospital of Emotions, an immersive pop-up that opened in late May inside the former St. Vincent Medical Center at 2131 W. 3rd St., near downtown Los Angeles, and runs through July 31. Across four floors and some 80 former hospital rooms, more than 70 artists have transformed operating suites, patient wards and nurses' stations into installations organized around eight emotional "departments": joy, love, sadness, fear, anger, hope, gratitude and resilience.

The show was conceived and curated by Yaara Sachs, who runs the experiential-art agency House of Art and Dreams. According to The Art Newspaper, an open call drew thousands of applicants, and selected artists — gallery painters, street artists, set designers, students — were each paid a fee plus a materials budget, a sign the project's ambitions run past the usual selfie-bait pop-up.

What you'll find on the wards

The building's own architecture does much of the emotional work; artists were told to work with the space, not paper over it. In one room, bold graffiti monsters stand in for the feelings people bury beneath professional composure. In another, a hospital bed is slowly swallowed by plants and botanical texts, nature reclaiming a place of clinical control. One installation recreates the disorientation of a seizure through shifting iridescent light and layered sound; another offers the opposite register — a bed in soft light, white twine trailing toward mirrored walls, quiet and almost tender. A room made with a veterans' group pairs filmed testimony with military artifacts, anchoring the show's abstractions in lived experience, and partner organizations focused on mental health, homelessness and recovery keep the work tethered to the city outside.

Immersive, but make it meaningful

Los Angeles has seen no shortage of experiential art over the past decade, from the Museum of Ice Cream to endless projection shows. Hospital of Emotions positions itself as a corrective: Sachs has described much of the immersive trend as overpriced and optimized for social media over substance, a standard her own show aims to subvert. Whether it fully succeeds is for each visitor to decide — ideally without checking their phone too often. The exhibition rewards slow, slightly disoriented wandering, the same quality most good hospitals once promised and rarely delivered.

If you go

General admission is about $55, with discounts for students, seniors, veterans and children. The show runs through July 31 at 2131 W. 3rd St.; tickets are available through the official website.