About Banchan Art

Banchan Art is a website focused on providing a user-friendly space for artists for managing their clients, commissions, and invoices, and for patrons to discover new and existing artists to follow and to commission art.

Our Mission

Our mission is to become a Platform Co-operative of workers and artists coming together to create a new kind of art community. You can read more about that on our membership page.

The platform co-operative model provides an alternative to the typical media sites that are often funded by venture capitalists, which are built to extract value from artists and their work, at their expense, while doing their best to crush any alternative they might otherwise have.

This platform is created, owned, and maintained with love and solidarity by Banchan Art LLC. We work in solidarity with organizations like Artisans.Coop, Comradery, and Ampled to imagine a different economy for the future.

Behind the Name

Banchan Art is named for the Korean culinary tradition of shared side dishes known as banchan.

Banchan includes a variety of dishes with different flavors and meanings. Each meal is a unique experience due to the constantly rotating selection of dishes and your ability to cater your meal by how much of each dish you select for yourself. You are able to satiate your palate for different tastes as you please.

The idea behind Banchan Art is to build a platform that provides a meeting point for artists and their supporters. This is a place where both artists and their patrons can customize their experience in a mutually beneficial and harmonious way. Our ideal for the platform is to make it easy and enjoyable to commission a custom piece of art for both sides. Similar to choosing different amounts of banchan to cater a meal to your taste, supporters can choose from different options set up by artists to commission the art piece that they will treasure.

Behind the Platform

The founders of this project are Kat and Atrian. We’re both artists and web developers, and we saw a need in this area after being a part of the social media discourse and how it adversely impacted artists.

We’re more interested in helping our community than in only helping ourselves, which is why we’re committed towards sharing management of this platform using cooperative principles. Our hope is that in the future this will grow bigger and allow us to be just two members out of many benefitting and guiding this platform.