IMAGE AND ARCHITECTURE #: TRIPITAKA KOREANA

How close can a copy, an artistic depiction, or a photographic print come to an architectural object or space it depicts? The experience of moving through a space cannot be substituted with an image, but the relation between a viewer and the printed object can be intimate and direct. In the past several years, I have worked with a new photographic printing process, combining rice paper and high resolution digital files, resulting in life size image-objects, able to capture and transfer ‘material’ and ‘materiality’ of architectural spaces and artistic artefacts with marvelous fragility and depth. This allows for a new view of well-known spaces to be created, nearly as direct, one-to-one experiences of deliberately chosen details. Work #11 in the series Image and Architecture captures The Tripitaka Koreana, the world’s greatest collection of Buddhist scriptures consisting of 81,258 wooden printing blocks, dating back to 1237. The collection, housed in four buildings at the Haein Temple, is a sacred space, albeit a space which is not monumental. It is an archive of knowledge that is meant to be reproduced, duplicated, disseminated. It is also a monument of crafts — the buildings in which the collection is kept are equipped with an ingeniously designed natural aircirculation system which has been able to preserve the blocks over millennia.