Poster for Korea Artist Prize 2023
- 2023
- digital print
- 594 x 841 mm (A1)
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.
- Project type:
- poster
- Typeface:
- custom letterform
