I have dealt with color checking since my first day as a photographer. Whether or not it’s the color I want, or if it’s the most ideal color I can achieve. In order to reach the perfect tone, my ex-girlfriend, who was also a photographer, taught me to correct every color before adjusting the tones that I wished to create. I was very much persuaded to go for perfect color correction at the beginning of my work with photography. I purchased multiple tools for color correction and tone adjustment One of these tools was the Color Checker. 24 colors, starting with light skin tone, dark skin tone, blue sky, foliage, etc. I learned in 2020, however, about the history of the creation of film technology—that it was intended to prioritize white people's skin—and about the Shelley card. I started to critique color checking as a metaphor of “color” checking racism in the US, as well as a generalization of stagnant standardized palettes.These imaginary “standard” colors gradually developed into a representation in terms of stock, indexicality images, which encapsulated experience and information into a flat visual language. Representation represents “realness” in terms of 21st century mass media.
One day last november I was thinking, “what if I make 24 kites out of the color checker’s color, fly them to ‘color checking’ the whole landscape - the land - the landscape - the people, the land of California?” Flying kites was one of the few activities that my dad was able to do with me when growing up. It is somewhat personal to me as well. Through flying these kites, I wish to harmonize the boundary between representation, imagination, revisiting my own memories and actualizing a warning sign, in the form of flying kites.
