London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

Transfer / 갈아타다: Korean and British Abstract Painting and the Digital Document

Date: Friday 24 February - Saturday 15 April 2023
Venue:
KCCUK | Grand Buildings | 1-3 Strand | London WC2N 5BW | | [Map]

Tickets: Free | More info here
Opening reception 23 February 2023 @6pm. Registration required via KCC website
Exhibition tour and seminar discussion, 24 February 2023, 2–5pm . Registration required via KCC website

lead image for Transfer exhibition

From 24 February – 15 April, the Korean Cultural Centre UK presents TRANSFER, a workshop-style exhibition that explores the digital documentation of painting. It consists of paintings juxtaposed with forms of digital documentation, and focuses on works from both the UK and South Korea which have been made over the past thirty years.

A ‘document’ is an accurate and official record, a memorialised representation capable of being used for reference, study, or as an accepted authority. Of particular interest in this exhibition is the exploration of what is lost in the transfer of information involved in the making of a digital document. To this end, TRANSFER includes works that flirt creatively with forms of ‘infidelity’ to the originals they document, and which thereby challenging the norms of such documentation.

TRANSFER is a research project involving artists, art historians, filmmakers, and digital scientists from academic institutions in the UK and Korea. By contrasting paintings by artists from a European and an East Asian nation the goal is to foreground commonalties and differences, and to ask questions about cultural influence in relation to the norms of the digital documentation of painting in general.

Participating Artists:

Simon Eaves | Sooyeon Hong | Alan Johnston | Inyoung Kim | Kim Taek Sang | Michael Kidner | Lee Ufan | Simon Morley | Anna Mossman | Rafaël | Daniel Sturgis | Jung Ah Woo

In collaboration with Kim Eun Sic | Josef Konczak | Park Myungrae | Ian Skelton

Exhibition Partner: University of Arts London
Additional Supporters: Dankook University, POSTECH

This exhibition explores the reality of painting in today’s ‘infosphere’. Our lives are becoming pervasively computational and digital, and the Covid-I9 pandemic merely accelerated a process already well underway and that is part of a much wider cultural development in which digital mediations are normalized as necessary, accessible, and adequate substitutes for embodied encounters in time and space. This is an ‘age of excarnation’ —of the removal of the body from the human world, as the philosopher Richard Kearny writes.

The mediations facilitated by digital still and video photography are primary tools for documenting works of art. By ‘document’, we refer to an accurate and official record, a memorialized representation capable of being used for reference, study, or accepted authority. In the broadest sense, documentation is a core feature of knowledge management and organization. In relation to painting, digital documentation involves the transfer of information between a source (a painting) and a target (a digital image of a painting).

The modes of transfer can be conceived as occurring along a spectrum. At one end there is transfer as translation. In this context, transfer involves making a general equivalency between the source and the target. A digital photograph of a painting by Alan Johnston in the exhibition exemplifies this basic or normative form of documentation. The inherent properties of the digital medium are treated as transparent. That is, they do not draw attention to their own inherent properties and have been manipulated to supply access to the ‘real’ of the painting by producing in the viewer a sense of the painting’s immediacy. This is achieved through using digital photographic technology so visual information embedded in the source painting is made available ‘at a glance’ in the digital representation accessed by the viewer.

Within the artworld, the digital documentation of painting, like all works of art, almost always occurs at the ‘translation’ end of the transfer of information spectrum. This is because the document must function as a credible and authoritative reference. Such credibility rests on access ‘at a glance’ to the source painting being provided through the application of technology to convey a fidelity to the source. Because of utilitarian, educational, managerial, and mercantile reasons, the normal protocols of the digital documentation of painting are therefore radically circumscribed. But while the digital is used to produce the illusion of immediacy, what it actually does is replace proximity by proxy.

This exhibition is more interested in exploring the other end of the spectrum of information transferral: transposition. This involves the substitution of distance for the immediacy delivered by translation. At this pole, the process of transfer is more arbitrary, and includes manipulation, repositioning, and substitution. The medium into which the information is transferred (the digital image) is now rendered more opaque – more visible – and therefore the information embedded in the source (the painting) is no longer so available ‘at a glance’. The digital medium ‘gets in the way’. In fact, in terms of the norms of documentation, transposition is a form of visual impedance because it causes deviation from or deterioration in the source information — in this case, a painting.

In the exhibition, limited transpositional strategies that do not entirely lose sight of the source painting include: the documentation of Kim Taek Sang’s working process and of the play of light on the finished painting over a period of 24 hours; the slow analysis of the tactile properties of the surface of a painting by Simon Morley, accompanied by ambient sound; a film that focuses on the shimmering, optical and unstable effects in Anna Mossman painting; and the filmmaker Simon Eaves’s nuanced meditation on artificiality in his encounter with a painting by Daniel Sturgis. The interactive potential of digital documentation is considered in the live streaming of the video feed coming from a camera set up in front of a painting by Michael Kidner. The feed both documents the painting and the interactions occurring in the space around it in the exhibition space.

The exhibition also includes greater degrees of transposition. Sooyeon Hong radically displaces her own painting shown in the exhibition into a digital animation accompanied my sound, and lnyoung Kim fully embraces the potential of the digital medium in order to produce a self-sufficient work of art in which manipulation, repositioning, and substitution render opaque the original source. The video by Rafael takes as its subject 10 Koreans’ responses to three questions concerning their responses to a digital reproduction of the Lee Ufan painting in the exhibition. Here, a far more radical kind of transposition occurs in which the ‘document’ is now the creative presentation of the reactions of the viewers to a digital image rather than documentation of the painting itself. The display of Lee Ufan’s painting in the exhibition alongside Rafael’s video poses challenging questions about the relationship between the digital document and real paintings.

The importance of the digital realm is not in question. However, problematic issues arise when sharing and disseminating paintings digitally. These may be due to the material subtleties of the paintings themselves that resist transfer into the photographic medium. Representations of artworks furnish disembodied visual readings as opposed to embodied and material experiences. Even when moving images are employed to document paintings, the model is the cinematic scanning shot and close up, and these techniques are quite foreign to how we actually look at and experience paintings. But more fundamental impositions may be involved that have their roots in the primacy of the mind and the eye within Western culture, and this is why TRANSFER brings together paintings and digital documents from a Western and East Asian country.

TRANSFER explores various modes of the `errant’ documentation of painting, modes that flirt creatively with infidelity to the original. The works willingly embrace transposition, and use the digital to introduce dimensions to paintings that are absent or lost when documented as ‘straight’ digital still- or moving-images. Such unorthodox ‘documents’ seek immediacy and distance, and can be described as involved in the potential of information transfer as translucency. In their various ways, the works in the exhibition recognize that under the novel conditions of today’s digital culture it is vital, as Richard Kearney writes, “to remain sensitive to both cyber and carnal existence — to honour the vital human need for ‘double sensibility’ : imagining and living in concert, touching and being touched in good measure.”


TRANSFER is the third ‘workshop’ in an international collaborative research project that brings together academics, curators, technical scientists, artists, and students from South Korea and the United Kingdom to discover and open up discussion around how paintings are documented and displayed digitally and online.

The project aims to create a better understanding of the various cultural sensitivities and biases that may occur when disseminating work in these ways. Especially in this pandemic era, when it has become the ‘new-normal’ to visit museum exhibitions virtually via mobile apps and online tours, this research focuses on the elusive nature of paintings, and how they evade the capture of digital media, and how best to innovate within media technology to provide a more enriching perceptual experience of art appreciation both online and offline will highly benefit museums and cultural institutions, and those who use them.

(automatically generated) Read LKL’s review of this event here.