Introduction

Exhibitions

Publications

Release dates

Project types

Commissioners

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The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and SBS Foundation have been co-organizing the Korea Artist Prize exhibition annually since 2012. The 2023 edition featured four nominees: Kim Byungjun, Gala Porras-Kim, Lee Kang Seung, and Jun Sojung. The exhibition explored the themes of human civilization and time.

For the Korea Artist Prize 2023’s visual identity, we sought to experiment with an idea that we had been considering for some time rather than directly reflecting the themes. We drew inspiration from an essay in a non-square Korean letterform published in 1976 by Cho Young Jae, a pioneer of modern graphic design in Korea. His idea was never developed into a typeface and remained a speculative proposal, but it is considered a precursor to non-square Korean typefaces designed since the 1980s. While Cho’s proposal is not directly related to the exhibition, we felt that they both shared an experimental spirit that prioritizes the process of questioning over final solutions. We also noted that the geometric characters echo the logo of the Prize.

To bring this idea to life, we took the construction of Cho’s letterform and adapted it to create new Korean characters. We also added figures and Latin glyphs for functionality. Expanding the character set to a family of four weights, we mixed the characters of differing stroke widths randomly to create an irregular texture, which contrasts with the letterform’s strict geometric order. The resulting image displays design and accident coexisting to produce the seemingly organic appearance by simple, mechanical rules.

The catalog’s front cover comes in four different versions to recognize the participation of four artists. The number four – and the exhibition’s spatial layout – informed the page grid structure and the overall composition, too: the elements are arranged in a quadrantal point symmetry around the center of the page (marked by the page number).

The book is divided into four sections, each covering one artist. This division is made visible by using different paper stocks: each artist section consists of a 32-page image part printed on glossy paper and a 16-page text part on newsprint. The front matter and auxiliary materials on a neutral white uncoated stock sandwich these artist sections. To accommodate the materials in this egalitarian allocation, we took a flexible approach to layout. The column height varies according to the text’s length, sometimes filling the entire page and other times – when the text is shorter – leaving ample space above or below (again, point-symmetrically).

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