Postcard, 2010, 148 x 105 mm. Designed for Under dem Motto 2010 book fair, organized by Motto Distribution, Berlin. We took the motto parts from various countries’ coat of arms.

A set of banners produced as a contribution to the exhibition Works in the Open Air, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, 9 July – 31 October 2010. 20 banners, digital printing on polyester, 60 x 180 cm each. Below is the statement.

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Institutionalized and administered spaces – the ubiquitous them parks. Their experience usually starts with the greeting message ‘welcome’ and ends with ‘good bye’. Conventional expressions devoid of specific meaning, they nevertheless mark the boundary of a space clearly. What would happen if the two greetings are uttered simultaneously, so the space in between disappears? A space where one is welcomed and expected to leave at the same time? Especially in the ‘multicultural’ Ansan, where many foreign workers reside, the disappearance would fell more accurate. There the space has been replaced by the ever-expanding border, and one is always anxious of falling into one side: either ‘welcome’ or ‘good bye’. And we realize the condition is not restricted to Ansan: it’s everywhere.

Poster for the outdoor exhibition at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, 2010, 594 x 841 mm. The exhibition emphasized the ‘transparency’ or ‘porosity’ of the public space, and how art plays a role in redefining, disturbing, or interconnecting the private and the public. Interestingly, the official Korean title of the exhibition is quite different to its English one: it may be translated as ‘Whatever happened to the theme park’, instead of the more neutral ‘Works in the Open Air’. We thought about the Modernist ideal of transparency, and how it became eventually fetishized over the course of the last century (‘theme park’). In the poster, we incorporated some references to Modernism: the geometric, constructed letterform of Josef Albers and the human figures created by Gerd Arntz for the Isotype system of Otto and Marie Neurath in the late 1920s. The original forms were treated in such a way to suggest ‘porosity’. See also the leaflet for the exhibition.

Leaflet for the outdoor exhibition at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, 2010, 148.5 x 210 mm when folded. The exhibition emphasized the ‘transparency’ or ‘porosity’ of the public space, and how art plays a role in redefining, disturbing, or interconnecting the private and the public. Interestingly, the official Korean title of the exhibition is quite different to its English one: it may be translated as ‘Whatever happened to the theme park’, instead of the more neutral ‘Works in the Open Air’. We thought about the Modernist ideal of transparency, and how it became eventually fetishized over the course of the last century (‘theme park’). In the poster, we incorporated some references to Modernism: the geometric, constructed letterform of Josef Albers and the human figures created by Gerd Arntz for the Isotype system of Otto and Marie Neurath in the late 1920s. The original forms were treated in such a way to suggest ‘porosity’. See also the poster for the exhibition.

Artwork for the Korean back cover of e-flux journal, no.17, 2010. e-flux journal is a magazine published by the electronic art announcement service network, e-flux. The journal is produced as a PDF document, and some designated local distributors make printed copies to physically circulate the journal. The back cover is reserved for customized content supplied by the distributors. The Korean distributor, The Book Society, decided to use the space for freshly commissioned works by Korean artists and designers. We were asked to come up with something for the first Korean issue, and we made this Celcius version of Fahrenheit 451: the title of a novel by Ray Bradbury (1951) as well as a film by François Truffaut (1966). Both in the novel and the film, the number 451 refers to the temperature at which book paper combusts.

Poster, produced as a contribution to Surfing the Black, a research project about Yugoslavian ‘Black Wave’ cinema, 2010, 700 x 1000 mm. Part of the project, initiated by Pietro Bianchi, Dubravka Sekulić, Gal Kirn and Žiga Testen at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, was to invite some designers to design posters about the films under discussion. Each designer or team was assigned a particular film, and in our case, it was I Miss Sonia Henie ‘curated’ by Karpo Godina in 1971. You can see the film here. We said the film was ‘curated’: below is some information about the film we found on the internet.

‘During 1971 Belgrade Film festival Karpo Godina recruited seven masters to direct a segment of the film, intercepted them at the hotel and handed them a 1-page set of instructions. The rules for this film were simple. Each director would make a 3 minute film. The film was to take place in one room, with the camera in a single position. No changing of lenses, framing, angle or position would be allowed. The camera position and room were the same for all segments, though props could change scene by scene. During the film, someone must say “I Miss Sonia Henie”. All shooting was done at night or early in the morning during the festival, on 35mm. Directed by Karpo Godina, Tinto Brass, Miloš Forman, Buck Henry, Dušan Makavejev, Paul Morrissey, Frederick Wiseman / Yugoslavia / 1971’

Our initial ideas was to ‘act out’ the idea of the film by inviting seven other designers to design a poster. For various reasons, the attempt failed almost even before we even started it. So, we changed our plan and decided to show the brief we had made for the poster.

Title sequence concept for the KBS’s art program TV Museum, 2010.

Promotional materials for Hyungkoo Lee’s solo exhibition at Doosan Gallery, Seoul, 2010. Magazine advertisement, dimensions variable; invitation, 152 x 190 mm.

Poster, produced as a contribution to Graphic Design Festival Breda, The Netherlands, 8–30 May 2010. 840 x 1190 mm; photography by Kyoung-tae Kim. We were invited, along with other 56 designers around the world, to participate in the poster project as part of the festival. The requirement was to create an original poster, which was to be exhibited on the streets of Breda, under the theme of ‘decoding’. Below is a description of the piece, partly inspired by Dan Friedman’s cover design for Typografische Monatsblätter (1971).

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A Night at a Lighting Shop, Euljiro, Seoul, 31 March 2010

We often find ourselves intrigued by things that seem to ask us, regardless of their true nature, to decipher their hidden meanings. For us, secret codes are everywhere: confident shapes arranged on a stencil template in a seemingly systematic yet not wholly comprehensible order; twelve-digit letters and numbers of barely visible size inscribed on a yogurt container; a standard symbol from a household appliance taken out of its original context and placed in a button on somebody’s chest; and the LED light specimens installed in a dense Seoul lighting shop, arbitrarily fixed in their ad-hoc positions, blinking in the after-hour darkness. If, as Oscar Wilde once claimed, ‘the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible’, then it is to our cryptographic delight that the visible world is full of uncoded codes, waiting to be converted into meanings that they themselves are not even aware of.

Annual publication in the form of newspaper, Seoul: Specter Press, 2010. 394 x 545 mm, 4 pp.

In 2009, Sasa[44] consumed 86 bowls of seolleongtang, 35 bowls of jajangmyeon, made 206 transactions with his public transport card, saw 7 movies at cinemas in Seoul, purchased 455 books from Kyobo bookstore, made 909 calls from his mobile phone, made 302 attendance records with the punch clock at his studio, and had 49 people in front of him in queues at banks, etc.

The detailed information is given in eight different languages: those primarily spoken in the eight countries in which Sasa [44] has ever exhibited in the past decade.

Identity for Art Institute Tomorrow, Seoul, 2010. Since the tagline of the institute was ‘Mapping your art world’, and the acronym, ‘AIT’, sounded the same as the number eight, we decided to use the eight-pointed asterisk as part of the logo, referring to the eight directions of the compass, as well as the star as a crucial sign for navigation.

Posters for the interdisciplinary art festival, 2010, 440 x 720 mm each. See also the poster part 1, part 2 and catalogue.