This art practice-based research aims to rediscover Gilles Deleuze’s theory of art as an aesthetics of Transcendental Realism through the process of Korean Bunche painting. Bunche painting, which I have been working on for twenty years, refers to a thousand-yearold traditional Korean painting technique which uses powder pigments mixed with water glue (Agyo) on Korean paper (Hanji) in multiple layers. By means of an action research methodology, a series of my Bunche paintings’ processes were documented with digital photography and film, and reinvented as an independent video art piece which I call Documentation Art.
This Documentation Art project challenges the conventional understanding of modern Korean Bunche painting in relation to the influence of Japanese Nihonga and Western abstract painting, and produces a new experimental potentiality, by means of interdisciplinary studies of Deleuze’s theory of art and the Korean art movement of Trueview (Jingyeong) realism. Throughout this research project, I explore how Deleuze’s process ontology and ‘virtuality’ give form to Documentation Art through ‘becoming’ and ‘desubjectification’ associated with transcendental time. Deleuze’s concept of the transcendental field of immanence, as a condition of real experience, radically recasts Plato’s Idea and subverts the notion of representation derived from Kantian transcendental aesthetic. This is the basis of the aesthetics of Transcendental Realism which integrates Deleuze’s ‘transcendental aesthetics of sensation’ with the aesthetics of ‘view from Tao’, based on Deleuze’s ontological position of the univocity of being.
As a result, the Documentation Art is provisionally defined as Agencement machines, which operate by connecting different fields, and giving the connected assemblages entirely new sensesthrough the experimental process. In Deleuze’s aesthetics of Transcendental Realism, the Documentation Art project searches for the real in the deepest of Deleuze’s ontological layer, where transcendental time is encountered, underneath conceptual representation and interpretation.