Warped by the Scan, Kept as Art

Seoul-based artist Taewon Ahn brings the errors of 3D scanning apps onto canvas. He turns the distortions created when apps can't tell shadows from solid objects into the language of his work. A cat's body stretches in strange ways, and a friend's face looks somehow warped. He twists these digital accidents on his iPad, cuts and pastes them, then airbrushes them onto canvases and sculptures. Though painted by hand, they look as smooth as screen images while simultaneously appearing off-kilter.

The subjects he paints are the beings closest to him—his cat and his friends. Familiar faces become strange through the limits of technology. 3D scanning apps misread shadows as substance or fail to capture contours properly. These mistakes had the strongest influence on his work. The traces left by imperfect technology become the most contemporary landscape of our time.

Errors and accidents that occur while digitally twisting and collaging photos all become material for his work. He then repaints these images by hand with an airbrush onto physical surfaces. Some are canvases, others sculptures. It's a way of manually reproducing digital accidents. The results look smooth yet somehow misaligned. Paintings that resemble screen images but possess materiality.

His work shows that technology becomes more interesting when it's imperfect. The scanning app made mistakes, and the artist accepted those mistakes as art. In the moment a familiar cat or friend's face starts to look strange, the limits of technology become a new visual language. The scanning app you use every day sometimes produces odd results—what would happen if you left them as they are?