Aura in Reproduction: Decayed or Reborn?
Walter Benjamin proposes in his renowned essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that traditional art forms, such as painting and sculpture, possess a unique, irreplicable quality rooted in their authenticity, originality, and singular existence in specific time and space, defined as “Aura” (Benjamin). He claims that with the advent of digital media like photography and film, Aura diminishes, as mass-produced copies through mechanical reproduction lack the uniqueness, history, and context of the original work (Benjamin 4). While Benjamin defines Aura as an inherent quality of the original artwork and mourns its decay, Warwick Mules reinterprets the decay of Aura as a productive loss and sees the affirmative impact of mechanical reproduction (Mules 2007, 2), especially in the democratization of art and its potential in political and social engagement.
However, both Benjamin and Mules consider the phenomenon of Aura only within mechanical reproduction and overlook a crucial fact: traditional artworks that are not mechanically produced are reflections or interpretations of reality; as a manual translation of the world, these works, too, involve a loss of genuineness. In other words, the loss of authenticity occurs even before mechanical reproduction and thus cannot be attributed solely to it. Therefore, I suggest that the Aura of traditional art precisely arises from this inevitable loss, the unbridgeable distance between authenticity and expression. How, then, can we claim that it necessarily diminishes with further mechanical reproduction?
Manual Translation and Mechanical Reproduction in 3-Fold. Photo
To lead into this discussion, I will analyze Hong Kong artist Yeung Tong Lung’s oil painting, 3-Fold. Photo, a visual articulation of the manual translation and mechanical reproduction. It exemplifies how Aura is specifically generated through layers of art creation: from the world - the primal origin - to the so-called original work (the oil painting) and the viewers’ phone camera. This analysis aims to investigate the inherent melancholy and unique charisma of art—the Aura that emerges from the very process of loss, regardless of the medium or technology used. This leads to a series of important questions: Does the uniqueness implied by Aura necessarily equate to authenticity? Does authenticity truly exist in an artwork, or is it the construct that dissolves through the layers of translation, reproduction, and reinterpretation?
3-Fold. Photo is an oil painting executed on a 185 x 240 x 3.7 cm canvas that features a striking contrast between colors and forms. The most visually arresting element is the inverted color scheme that mimics the look of a negative film. Figures and foliage in the foreground are rendered in pale blues, whites, and grays, with a nearly translucent texture, giving them an otherworld, ghostly appearance. The bright orange sky dominates the upper half of the composition, contrasting sharply against the muted tones of the figures and cityscape. The largest central figure, serving as the focal point, is positioned slightly off-center in the middle left of the canvas, occupying nearly one-third of the canvas. This figure, wearing a black mask, evokes themes of anonymity and isolation.
What makes this work even more intriguing is its interaction with modern technology. When the work is viewed through a phone camera’s inverse mode, the image reverts to more natural colors: the orange sky reverts to its original blue, and the ghost-like figures gain their concrete bodies. By involving the use of the phone camera as an indispensable part of the artwork, Yeung questions whether things we see through our naked eye are always authentic and how modern technology affects our perception of reality.
This work involves both the manual translation of reality onto the canvas and the mechanical reproduction through the phone camera. As viewers increasingly perceive the world through screens rather than direct sight, Yeung’s work unfolds these two processes in an exaggerated yet straightforward way: even what is seen with the naked eye might have been impacted (as seen in the negative-film quality mimicked by the painting) and even distorted (such as the normal color scheme captured through a phone camera in inverse mode) by digital media. Technology is changing how we see the world, making it harder to discern and define reality.
Yeung is aware of the immense impact of technology on viewers’ interpretation of artworks and recognizes that the viewers’ use of phones and cameras can further alter their interpretation of the piece. The same painting can appear differently depending on the angle or lighting in a photograph, which means artists possess limited control over how their work is understood and interpreted. However, Young is very optimistic about this limitation: “A painting is not only about whether the audience can or can not understand anything about it. Instead, it is about the intellectual space it creates for you to think” (M+ Magazine). As Roland Barthes famously claimed, once an artwork is exhibited, disconnection occurs, the visual representation loses its origin, the artist enters his own death, and art begins (Barthes 2016, 141).
Beyond the Artist-Viewer Relationship: The World as Primal Origin
Thus far, our discussion primarily centers on mechanical reproduction and the relationship between the artist and the viewers. According to Benjamin, Yeung’s painting has been duplicated countless times through photography, and these reproductions have lost the uniqueness and authenticity of the original work, which is attributed to the decay of Aura. Unique is undeniably lost in the process of mechanical reproduction, but does authenticity truly fade along with it? In other words, does the original work truly possess authenticity? Does any work possess authenticity? Could art creation be a genuine act?
To address these questions, we must move beyond the artist-artwork-viewer relationship chain and consider the primal origin that precedes the artist within this chain, something beyond human reach - the world itself. Whether traditional paintings or photographs, whether figurative or abstract, art is essentially a reflection of the world. It could be a direct depiction of what we see or a manifestation of what we think. Therefore, the so-called origin of an artwork is not the primal, original source but something that has been processed, interpreted, and re-created by the artist, making it a secondary product. In this case, the Aura is not original (Mules 2007, 3). The absolute authenticity inevitably begins to fade once the artist infuses his observations and thoughts upon the world into his work. Thus, there is no genuine act, no genuine art creation; authenticity is ineffable and resides exclusively within the inner world of each artist. Aura, however, is the unique phenomenon of distance, and it just begins to emerge through this continuous process of loss. Though lacking in the original authenticity, each act or reproduction gains its own significance, the “new Aura.”
Aura: the Melancholic Charisma of Art
Contrary to Benjamin, I suggest that Aura is not an inherent quality of traditional painting or any art form. Rather, it is something gradually lost through translation and reproduction, beginning from the world as the primal origin, moving through the artist’s interpretation and creation, and finally arriving at the viewer’s perception. Yeung’s 3-Fold. Photo undergoes the inversion of colors twice - first from reality to canvas, then to phone camera - showing how distance is created from the original source throughout different stages of creation and how the new Aura continually emanates. Aura reveals the insurmountable gap between authenticity and expression, and its creation relies on the loss derived from reproduction.
Artistic creation, a reflection of the authentic world that involves various forms of translation or reproduction at its core, is always accompanied by an irrecoverable loss of genuineness. Instead of decaying, Aura is continually produced throughout conception, practice, exhibition, and mechanical reproduction. As Robert Frost’s famous statement goes—“What is poetry? Poetry is what gets lost in translation”—the authenticity of art dwells solely within the inner world of individual artists, unreachable and untold. For this ineffability, art is fated to be melancholic.
Bibliography
Barthes, Roland. “The death of the author.” In Readings in the Theory of Religion, 141–145. Routledge, 2016.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936.” New York 1935.
Bolter, Jay David, Blair MacIntyre, Maribeth Gandy, and Petra Schweitzer. “Benjamin’s crisis of aura and digital media.” Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal 6, no. 8 (2006).
Mules, Warwick. “Aura as productive loss.” Transformations 15 (2007).
M+ Team. “Yeung Tong Lung: A Space Beyond Words.” M+ Magazine, January 13, 2020. https://www.mplus.org.hk/en/magazine/yeung-tong-lung-a-space-beyond-words/.