The Blue in You / On a Windy Day We Must Go to Apgujeong / 301, 302

  • 2025 
  • digital print
  • three parts, each 300 x 300 mm

We were invited to contribute new designs for three historic Korean film soundtrack albums of our choice as part of an exhibition about Korean film music since the 1960s.

The three soundtrack records we chose share a common trait: they were all released in the early 1990s and reflected a “western” urban sensibility introduced alongside the forces of globalization and consumerism sweeping through Korean society at the time. Additionally, unsquared Hangeul characters were used on the posters and album covers for these films to express modernity.

Thirty years later, in the mid-2020s, nostalgia for the imagined 1990s and its cultural sophistication is driving retro trends in popular culture. However, when examining the original artifacts from the 1990s – and contrary to your memory – the traditional Korean flavor is so strong that the supposedly modern and transcendental foreign words and numbers in unsquared Hangeul characters can seem embarrassing.

We developed new designs by replacing the original unsquared characters with primordially squared ones. It showcases the first use of our typeface in development, Squareform, a modern interpretation of the earliest Hangeul characters found in Hunminjeongeum Haerye (1446). It was an attempt to revive – paradoxically or impossibly – an atmosphere that was negated and suppressed in the originals.

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