Visual Digitality: Towards Another Understanding

Abstract

Given the assumption that the way an image is put together affects how we see it, this paper will seek to explore how art, image, photography and painting can be talked about since the advent of digital painting, especially in Asia. Faced with a composited image file that is located somewhere between the histories of painting and of photography, we need therefore to ask what exactly is the digital image. How do we as viewers from the age of film and photography come to the age of digital visuality, which is intrinsic to the vision of an Asian renaissance? The present trove of digital lexicon has gifted us with new metaphors to imagine this visuality: layering, channel operations, re-sizing, alpha channels and masking, etc. At the same time, we are, as mass-media consumers, seduced by the familiarity of its surface declaration and the seamless integration of disparate elements. Using examples of digital artwork from artists such as Jason Wee, Miao Xiaochun, Issei Yoshida, we ask if the logic and politics of representation has changed from the days of the disjunctive modernist avant-garde collage. Can we locate the impact of digitality in Asia through a newfound intractability of the digital image, which is situated within a necessary excavation of the profundity of its construction processes?