Keeping your own artist archive — platforms disappear

Once it took me an hour to find the information for a single painting.

The photographs were in folders by shooting date, the dimensions were in a different note, and the weight was nowhere. In the end I pulled the work out of storage and measured it again. Measured, put it back, and wrote the number down somewhere else.

It was not that the material never existed. The documents and the images were simply kept apart. With ten works this is not a problem. Past a hundred, it starts eating time.

For work that will not come out for years, the record is everything

A painting that goes into storage may not come out for years. In the meantime, the only thing that can speak for it is the record.

If you have to unwrap it to know its size, and take it out to know its condition, that work is effectively buried. An exhibition proposal, an insurance valuation, a shipping quotation — if each one means opening the crate, the work moves less and less.

So the trace has to be left before it goes in: photographs, dimensions, weight, whether it is framed, and how it is packed.

Weight matters less domestically. Shipping inside Korea is usually quoted by number of pieces and distance. Once a work sells through an overseas platform, though, it changes: the size of the work, whether it is framed, and the weight decide a large part of the shipping cost. International shipping deserves its own entry.

Either way, if it is not measured before it goes in, the work has to come out again later.

Price is part of the record — but only you see it

The field people leave out of their records most often is price.

This is not an argument for putting every price on a website or a platform. Rather the opposite: price is not information to publish, it is information to manage. What each work is worth, how far a discount can go, what the last one actually sold for — that belongs inside your own record.

But the moment to produce it does arrive.

When a museum borrows a work, they ask for a sale price. Not out of admiration — for insurance. To set an insured value for transport and the exhibition period, they need a figure to work from. Answering "around this much, I think" is a bad position to be in.

Preparing a solo or group show is the same. Build a price list for the first time just before an opening and you decide in a hurry, and prices decided in a hurry tend to be low. Prepared in advance, you simply transfer it.

And then there is work that sits in storage for years. Nobody has asked about it for a long time. Who sets its value? While the market is not looking, the person who keeps and maintains that value is the artist. Not written down, even you will eventually lose your own reference point.

Can someone else do it for you?

You can pay someone to organise it. Some artists do.

But what another person can organise is the fields, not the context. Which work branched out of which, why the material changed that year, which failure started the next series — nobody knows that except the artist. Hand it over and the fields get filled while the larger thread comes apart.

And the more prolific the artist, the higher this cost climbs. If works accumulate faster than they are recorded, recording becomes a thing to do "later" forever. Try to do it all at once and by then there are years of it.

It also costs money. The more work there is, the more it costs. Starting from nothing — no photographs, no digital material — means beginning with the shoot, and having the photography and cataloguing done runs to several hundred thousand won, or into the millions for a retrospective's worth of work.

Not many artists can absorb that. For an established name, perhaps; for most people it is a real burden. Which is why, the earlier you are in your career, the more it matters to photograph and file a little at a time from now on. What is expensive to buy all at once is nearly free done daily.

An archive is what happens before you send a PDF

People look you up before they ask for anything.

Collectors, curators, museum staff — all the same. They search the name, scan the work, form an impression, and only then get in touch. The PDF comes after that.

So an archive is not preparation for sending material. It is making yourself findable before anything is sent. If that place is empty, the person searching simply closes the tab.

Platforms can disappear

There are now a number of web platforms that will manage an artist's work as a portfolio, attach distribution and sales, and even connect you to open calls. They are convenient. Upload and they do the showing.

In Korea these platforms appear and disappear in cycles. New services open every year and some of them quietly close. Galleries behave the same way: in any given year some open and some shut.

The problem arrives when one of them closes, or changes direction. Then the artist finds another platform and uploads everything again from the beginning: re-fitting the photographs, rewriting the descriptions, reformatting to the new template. Repeat that a few times and an artist's time goes not into the work but into following platforms around.

This is not an argument against platforms. I use them. But it is worth using them knowing that what you put there is not your record — it is their data.

An artist's archive is a different thing in kind

The archive an artist builds is not a list made to show someone. It is entirely one's own record.

When that record is in your own hands, platforms become windows you can open and close. A new one appears: export from the record and upload. One shuts down: close it and move on. Nothing shakes.

And the form that record takes when seen from outside is a portfolio website. In my case that is the work pages and the CV.. The same record feeds the CV.") One address, the same one at home and abroad. That is why it is built in advance. Build it after you need it and the material is already scattered.

In a stretch of time where platforms and galleries appear and vanish this quickly, what remains to hold on to is the work you made and the record you kept of it. To avoid being carried along by that speed, you have to build a place of your own.

So an archive is not an exercise in tidying the past. It is making it possible for the person you will be in a few years to look back at the work you are making now. If what survives is documentation rather than memory, those works can be taken out and used again.

What belongs to one work

• Title (both languages) · year
• Size (height × width × depth, cm) and weight
• Medium — one consistent wording
• Series and position — the lineage comes from here
• Photographs — face at original resolution, details, edge, verso, signature
• Packing and storage — how it is wrapped and where it is
• Exhibition history · sale or ownership
• Price — list price, discount floor, insured value (kept private)

Weight and packing look like things you can find out later. Without them, the work has to come out of storage again.

What you can do today

1. Make one table and fill in your ten most recent works. Trying to do all of them is how you never begin
2. For new work, record photographs, dimensions and weight before it goes into storage. Afterwards it costs ten times as much
3. Rename photo files as year-series-number, and use the same name in the table

Next time

Next: how to number the works. Choose the wrong rule and you will renumber everything a few years later.