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Overview
Dates
03.20-03.25.2020
Curator
HSU Fong-Ray
Venue
Tina Keng Gallery 3F, No. 15, Ln. 548, Ruiguang Rd., Neihu Dist., Taipei, Taiwan
In 2020, the world entered the year under an uncanny and uncertain atmosphere. In response to this extraordinary moment, the art world began shifting art fairs—traditionally hubs of commercial energy—onto online platforms. Was this merely a reluctant contingency, or did it signal a new epoch in which viewing technologies and backend data could be integrated, ushering contemporary art into a transformed mode of collecting and experiencing?
For the inaugural Online Viewing Rooms of Art Basel, Tina Keng Gallery, in collaboration with TKG+, extends this inquiry into the evolving conditions of exhibition-making and collecting platforms. Together, they present the special project “1D31 Online: Back-end”, which deconstructs and reconfigures the structure of the Online Viewing Rooms, presenting it in conjunction with a physical exhibition.
As the physical and the digital converge—where the warehouse becomes the backend, and the exhibition space becomes the interface—artworks traverse layers of mediation, arriving before the user through continuous processes of compression and decompression. In this context, can viewers still perceive the aura of the artwork within the act of clicking through its digital form, and witness the image-based miracle produced by the platform itself?
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“Diseases, diagnostic confirmation, quarantine, disappearance, unsuspicion; works, cloud, browsing; economy, loss and gain, security.” Economic activities at this massive scale need to go on. Trading and transactions of such nature bear the resemblance of a nuclear reactor that is born without a control rod – caesurae during the unstoppable equal financial losses.
What could be done is to continue head-on and turn physical presence into data, twisting weight, materials and texture into screens, layers and clicks. In a safe house where the dimensions of time and space are now erased, the control of viewing and its technology dictates revenue and growth of the activities.
The fair allows an image space of ten artworks on the first layer of its online viewing platform. On the second layer, three images of partial views can be added to each work. Additional images of works are made exclusive from public view through its back-end as an online storage.
This very design mirrors the storage space a gallery would have at a physical fair. The storage is the back-end, whereas the exhibition space now exists only on the web page. When the experience gained through the trouble of the feet is now turned into a click of a mouse with a finger, a work of art is required to compress its presentation so that it can jump through all of the hurdles and be presented in front of the viewers / users. What is left of the work becomes defendant on the ability and will of the viewer / user to unzip and decompress with their eyes. The maneuverability to integrate the technology of seeing with digital presentation ultimately governs the relationship between artworks and the act of collecting.
Tina Keng Gallery and TKG+ present 1D31 Online: Back-end to feature the works of eight artists with both of our physical and online showrooms. Through the digitization of art, we hope to transform the aura of the works into a “miracle” of pictorialized presentation.
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Artist
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Installation View
