In the winter of 2004, I was confounded by the spectacle of the St Paul’s Cathedral in London covered by scaffolding with a life-size painting, an exact replica, of the cathedral: the separation between reality and simulation collapsed for me. Depending on where I stood, as my perspective shifted, the building would alternate between reality and hyper-realistic simulacrum. It was surreal. The life-size painting of the cathedral masked the original, but also stood in for it. Many passers-by and visitors were entranced by the unreality of the sight.

There are two main streams of thought in art history. One stream seeks to imitate the real world, the other to project an ideal. These two streams have always been at odds with each other; the history of art has been a back-and-forth dialogue between realism and idealism.

When a scientific basis for representing perspective was discovered in the Renaissance period, this offered an alternative way to convert reality’s three dimensions into the two dimensions of art. The invention of photography in 1839 was sensational, as images became so real as to appear life-like. Yet photography also simply converts reality from its original three dimensions to the fixed two dimentions of silver.

However when a photograph represents a two-dimensional perspective painting, does this represent a three-dimensional reality or offer a mirror image?

My question in ‘Facade’ is: What does such photography embody? Reality or the ideal? The body of work that I produced after seeing Saint Paul's Cathedral examines photography’s ambivalent role in representation.

In contemporary art and photography, there has been heated controversy between styles that imitate the salon-like atmosphere of pictorialism and styles such as pictorial photography, that by contrast, follow a representative tradition, such as hyper-realism or photo realism. Yet in the digital era, the boundaries between painting and photography have blurred, with both forms hybridising and becoming, at times, indistinguishable.

If a painting were converted via photographic technique to the exact size and shape of the object it represents, would the resulting image be a photograph or a painting?

What happens if an artist were to manipulate this digitalised photographic image using computer techniques, and to produce a photograph much better than an original painting?

Moreover, if an artist were to photogaph a copy of a photo-realist painting, is the resulting image a photograph or a painting?

‘Facade’ explores the fluid movements between reality and the ideal. The photographs examine the movement of human desire in the scaffolds and coverings that project idealized images onto shabby realities that are not to our liking.

Focusing on urban and hyper-urban spaces, this work quotes Jean Baudrillard’s theories on simulation and simulacra, and uncovers the unstable, volatile nature of both reality and idealism. This is the instability of desire in the urban spaces of our contemporary era.

Dec 2005
Han Sungpil