The razor-sharp pictures that are reproduced on Samsung’s latest high-definition generation of television monitors produce Technicolor. A colour so pigment enriched as to defy reality. The new screens are the logical extension of a central aim of Pop Art; to assert not the integrity of the picture plane, but to state categorically that nothing lies behind the flat-image. This has been taken to its painterly conclusion in the Super-flat art of the Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami. The broader concerns of all the artists in this exhibition are the impact of digital technology on our lives and the appropriation of the flat image.

Mari Kim’s Nara-like depiction of porcelaneous dolls pays lip-service to Japanese Manga and Anime culture. Each manikin quite literally has stars in its eyes, transfixed by a material culture that afflicts the young and impressionable of East Asia perhaps more than any group on the continent. The dolls either hold or wear their latest trophy or else masquerade as instantly recognisable Western cultural and political icons; such as Vermeer’s ‘Woman with a pearl earring’ or Margaret Thatcher. Both subjects, it can be argued, were popularised by other media: book, film and television and this highlights this artist’s concern and those of all the artist in the show, with the digital reception of images in the twenty-first century.

The appropriation of imagery from nineteenth century Academic Western oil painting by Bae Joonsung, adds another layer of cultural displacement to that revealed to us in Mari Kim’s dolls. Bae has extended his genre to focus on elaborate interiors and archaeological sites while continuing to suggest that beneath the surface appearance lies a deep-seated cultural insecurity.

Iconography in the digital age can be drawn from a wide range of sources. Kim Yongjin, counter-balancing Bae Joonsung’s reliance on Western cultural devices, looks at timeless Korean ceramic forms such as the tea-pot and maebyeong (in Chinese Meiping) celadon vase of the Goryeo dynasty. Decoration of the vessels is picked out in coiled wire and in a colour that mirrors the distinctive iron-ground under-glazes of Buncheong ware. The visualisation of imagery through a technological prism is at the core of Hong Sungchul’s work.

The artist’s grid of elastic strings stained with colour to form intimate depictions of the human form once again addresses the secondhand reception of reality in a technology-obsessed world. Similarly, the nail-encrusted anthropomorphic shapes created by the sculptor Lee Jaehyo have a digital rhythm, which derives from the ordering of the polished spikes into patterns that mirror water eddies.

Text by Dr. Iain Robertson, Head of Art Business Sotheby’s Institute of Art.

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