Airan Kang

Airan Kang is best known for encasing book dust jackets in resin shells with LED, transforming them into colorful light sculptures programmed to vary in brightness, hue, and intensity. Since 1999, Kang has presented various iterations of this in her ongoing “Digital Book Project”. For the 2010 exhibition “Light Reading,” she drew inspiration from classic works of literature (by Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Blake, and Lord Byron, among others) and art books (on the likes of Edward Hopper and Pablo Picasso), recreating their covers with slight modifications. Stacking the digital books thematically on shelves in the gallery, Kang refashioned the libraries and bookstores from around the world in which originally she found (and photographed) the paper versions of these titles. In tune with contemporary expectations that knowledge be readily available, text excerpts from each book scrolled across the surfaces.