Light reading

Airan Kang’s artistic lexis centers on book-shaped sculptures fashioned out of resin and LEDs... Made with LED devices that emit colored lights programmed to continually change in brightness, hue and intensity, each “book” in this exhibition conflates material and ephemeral depictions of knowledge to realize the pluralistic spaces of our imagination.

For this exhibition, Airan Kang furthers her Digital Book Project. This virtual world was created as an homage to specific books that are her current sources of inspiration. Kang traveled around the world to visit and photograph different bookstores and famous libraries in order to then recreate each environment as digitized versions of the original simulacra. The familiarity of these places gives Kang’s lurid universe an unexpected and sublime sense of organic beauty.

Each of Kang’s unique book covers are modified appropriations of the original covers rather than an exact replica. The “hyper books” are then arranged in stacks to show Kang’s growing interest in the relationship between text and the imagined literary space that the texts represent. This is further asserted as quoted text from each books in LED scrolls across the surface, making the information contained readily available and accessible to the viewer. Thus the content of each book is automatically visible, suggesting an ultramodern view of knowledge and intellect that is predetermined and entitled, rather than learned over time.
Airan Kang