Art Lighting Designers Contemporary Wall Wash Lighting @ Korean Cultural Centre

Young In Hong : The Moon's Trick Exhibition

Previously each of the exhibitions we had assisted with at Korean Cultural Centre UK (KCCUK) used conventional localised track spotlighting.

Over the last 18 months, each exhibition came with a little more funding to purchase additional equipment. This included lighting track, spotlights and museum-quality LED lamps (see previous exhibition links) which improved the lighting beyond all recognition.

However for Young In Hong embroidery exhibition "The Moon's Trick" it was decided to look at a different style of lighting altogether.

The curator had seen at other contemporary art galleries and wanted to try lighting which uniformly spread the light evenly across the gallery walls. Normally this form of contemporary art lighting is commonly referred to as wall washing.

To achieve high-quality contemporary wall wash lighting, the light fixtures have to be able to spread the light more to the bottom of the wall than the top, as obviously the light fitting is mounted closer to the ceiling.

Wall washers have various ways of doing this the most expensive light fittings use a lens to cleverly capture light and send more if to the base of the wall. By the time it travels the extra distance it reduces in power and therefore creates an even spread of light.

Therefore we contacted many lighting manufacturers to test their wall wash lighting products. However, most of them could only provide light fittings of 4000K (kelvin) this temperature of light still wasn’t cool enough for the client.

Although they were still tested to see which one would provide the best spread of light using the lighting track which was already installed. Sadly none could create a constant even spread of light and the cost of these fittings was far beyond the Korean Cultural Centre UK (KCCUK) budget.

As art lighting designers we then investigated the idea of using various lengths of LED battens that spread the light 120 degrees.

These proved to be more effective at spreading the light than anything previously tested. They could also be purchased at 6000K (a very cool white light) which the curator thought perfect and at less than 10% of the cost of the wall washing fittings.

The result of which can be seen here in the exhibition and the live performance for Hong’s exploration about the relationship between image and sound via ‘photo-scores’ which was performed at the opening to great approval.

Click on the thumb nail images on the right hand side of the screen to view lighting design projects or related links below.

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