PROTOTYPE questions how the way images are perceived is changing in an environment called “digital space.” Images no longer establish an order based on a single “original.” Today’s visual culture creates the flow of perception through the repetition of replication, transformation, and distribution, and images branch out systematically in a series of similarities and differences.

Artist Ok Seungcheol (1988–) has explored the structure of such an image environment through painting and three-dimensional works. In particular, his paintings function not as a genre of fixed reproduction, but as a field for artistic simulation that creates an unstable and indeterminate state. His focus is placed on contemporary visual culture, particularly the “consumption” and “distribution” aspects of images. Replicated images are consumed in a nonphysical state, with distribution channels that no longer require physical media such as printed materials or exhibition spaces. Therefore, the artist creates the space based on the ESD (Electronic Software Distribution) model, an exhibition structure that is distributed without physical form, akin to software. The casually displayed works exist as various “versions” that can be called up and distributed at any time.

The entire space of the Lotte Museum of Art is divided into exhibition rooms named Prototype 1–3, with each of them branching into several other rooms, as though offering choices. After viewing one exhibition room, the audience must return to the central hallway. This process must be repeated to view the entire exhibition, and ultimately, the audience will understand and remember the flow of the exhibition in their own way.

The word “prototype” originally referred to “the first form of something to be repeated,” but for Ok Seungcheol, rather than a complete “original,” it is a fluid database that can be called up and transformed at any time. Rather than a presentation of a fixed interpretation, more than 80 old and new works displayed in PROTOTYPE are an open process that shows how images are created and perceived within the cyclical structure of contemporary images, in which replication and distribution have become common practices.

The environment and structure of contemporary images visualize the differences between memory and interpretation that are divided according to perspective, and are delicately adjusted to reveal the illusion of distributed information and multiple points of view. In a digital environment where it is easy to reveal oneself, the self is rather assembled in an opaquer manner. Ok Seungcheol’s repeated faces are portraits of this unstable structure and its cracks. The diversely imitated and varied shapes are built on the visual conditions of replication and distribution. Here, the audience becomes beings who personally create and interpret the structure of today’s image environment through perception.