Ingee Chung

Colour as pattern is a research project about the halftone print process which is largely used in printing industry. Ingee began his own investigation from here and discovered that the patterns, which humans aren’t able to see directly through our own eyes, have an interesting relationship with colour: 'Every printed colour has its own moire pattern'.

In other words, ‘colour as pattern’ is an experiment involving the printing process. To enable the continuous tone of images, the halftone process is one of the most commonly used printing processes in industry as a way to trick our perceptions. The halftone process is not an infinite range of continuous tones. It relies on a basic optical illusion; the tiny halftone dots are blended into smooth tones. It needs 4 colour channels; cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Each channel is composed of halftone dots to create the continuous tone image. These halftone patterns are combined in a certain angles to make colour and saturation. It is a colour when seen in distance, but a pattern in close up. These dots are printed in a small size that is why we perceive these patterns as a colour.

In this project, his different approach towards the printing process, which is ‘zooming-in’ on printed colours, is to detect a repeated singular pattern. Then these singular patterns are printed continuously with different sizes; small to big, to visualise a transferring process between pattern and colour. He tries to break the distance between the media and the viewer by ‘zooming-in’ to visualise a structure which is hidden beyond the view of the human eye. It is a starting point to question about standardisation that people might not have ever recognised.