CASTING

Artist Note

Casting is a site-specific projection installation developed during Yiyun Kang’s residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It begins with the Cast Courts themselves: rooms built around plaster reproductions of architectural fragments, monuments, and sculptures that hold layered histories of copying, preservation, and cultural transmission. Their already surreal atmosphere becomes the work’s point of departure. Rather than overlooking the casts’ status as copies, Casting focuses on it: what happens when a collection of reproductions encounters digital projection, another inherently reproducible medium? The work proposes that this encounter can generate a new and temporary form of originality.

Digital projections travel across columns, figures, mouldings, and walls, wrapping the pale casts in moving image, shadow, and ephemeral light. This projected membrane does not add physical objects to the room; instead, it changes the perception of what is already there. As images appear and disappear, the solid casts shift between object, image, fragment, and architecture. Historical forms and virtual light enter a temporary symbiosis, creating a spatiotemporal environment in which the collection is continuously recast.

Casting does not seek to replace the past with digital spectacle. It asks how reproduction might become a site of creation rather than repetition. How might technology help viewers return to historical objects not as settled images, but as living questions of originality, memory, and cultural transmission?

Casting is a site-specific installation created by V&A Samsung Korean Digital Art Resident Yiyun Kang as part of her six month residency at the Museum. On 12 February and 18 March, Kang wrapped the architectural casts in the Cast Courts with digital projections, thus inviting visitors to experience this iconic space in an entirely new way.

Cast Courts, Gallery room 46A,
Victoria andAlbertMusuem
London, UK. 2016.

Acquired by V&A in 2018

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/casting-by-yiyun-kang?gclid=CjwKCAjwvOHzBRBoEiwA48i6ApNtIUkL2OAy302WtBrE0bWUiWjxw0_etJHg_0BRJaO0mQCMLg_6axoCle0QAvD_BwE

In the artist’s words:
‘The atmosphere in the Cast Courts is already somewhat surreal. I have attempted to build on this atmosphere without producing physical objects. The layer of ephemeral lights creates a spatiotemporal experience in which the real casts meet the virtual in a unique symbiosis’.

Kang wanted digital projection mapped onto the casts would provide a virtual portal that invites the audience to another dimension; mixed reality environment. This membrane of artificial light transformed the existing casts in a perceptually different way. In so doing, this installation would offer a thought-provoking experience to the audience.

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“CASTING is a projection mapping (new territory for the Museum) specifically designed for the V&A’s collections, engaging the audience by its strong immersive qualities despite using complex digital techniques and logistics”.

V&A curator Dr. Rosalie Kim, who led the acquisition process, 2016

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CASTING MAKING PROCESS

First opened in 1873, the Cast Courts were built to exhibit one of the most comprehensive collections of casts of post-classical European sculpture. The gallery houses the V&A’s largest objects and is among the most popular in the Museum. The Cast Courts have often been a source of controversy during the 14o-odd years of their history, not least because of an earlier reaction against copying original works of art. Now, however, the interest of the collection as a whole has come to be fully appreciated.