The Digital Documentation of Materiality in Painting: The Case of Contemporary Korean and British Abstract Art

This research focuses on a dilemma faced by museums and cultural organisations is how they represent and disseminate artworks digitally whilst respecting their inherent qualities. A further consideration is how do they ensure they do not misrepresent artworks due to cultural insensitivities and biases inherent in digital visualization.

The digital realm is not in question. However, when sharing and disseminating paintings several problematic issues arise. This may be due to the material subtleties that act against simple photographic representation of such works. But it may also be because of a more fundamental imposition that has its roots in Western ocular-centrism and the primacy of the mind and the eye. Photographic representations of artworks stress a disembodied visual reading as opposed to an embodied and material experience. Visual documentation is dependent on ambient lighting (daylight, LED etc...) which again introduces other cultural presuppositions and biases. Even when moving images are employed to represent paintings, the model used is the cinematic scanning shot and close up and quite foreign to how we actually look and experience paintings.

We will consider the Dansaekhwa painters, Park Seo-bo (*1931), Chung Sang Hwa (*1932), Ha Chong-Hyun (*1935) Lee Ufan (*1936), who emerged in the 1970s and approached painting not only as a visual experience but also as a performative process and put special stress on addressing the properties of their physical materials (canvas, rice paper, oil, pencil) as tactile and vibrant grounds for embodied actions. Drawing on still culturally resonant traditions of literati painting and calligraphy, which reflected cultural values that highly regarded the importance of artistic practices as grounds for refining the self-discipline of mind and body, these painters pursued their own methods, adopting Western painting to redefine Korean philosophy and aesthetics, and extending the boundaries of modern art beyond those explored by Western artists. This will be supplemented by addressing the emergence in the UK, in the mid 1960s, of Op Art, a movement associated with artists Michael Kinder (1917-2009) and Bridget Riley (*1931) who were also engaged in ideas of visual and physical perception.

We will refer to a longer historical framework in which a Western 'imperialistic' vision set about compartmentalising and framing tactile, sequential, and material encounters with East Asian art. This can be exemplified in the convention of unfurling and framing of handscrolls that were designed to be looked at intimately, through touch and sequentially so that they conformed to Western conventions of interpretation and documentation.

Through engaging with contemporary Korean and European practices of documentation and dissemination we will consider the extent to which the cultural differences reflected in Korean art, compared to that of Europe and America, may no longer be as significant in an age of globalization and homogenization. But this may impact on the conventions established to record not just contemporary painting, but also, retrospectively, the paintings of an earlier periods.

We will also investigate how experimental and innovative forms of digital representation may be able to better capture the embodied and material reading of artworks. We will examine paintings from Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, and by contemporary British and Korean artists, during workshops with computer engineers and students. We will discuss 'models' for new digital representations and virtual environments that are better able to disseminate the perceptual and embodied experiences of such paintings.

We will disseminate our research in collaboration with museums and scholarly associations. The PI, Co-Is, and 4 key participants will disseminate findings through a public conference at UAL.