Curatorial Notes 

The oldest book created from movable metal type, Jikji, was printed at Heungdeok Temple in Korea in 1377 during the Goryeo dynasty, 78 years before Gutenberg’s acclaimed ‘42-Line Bible’ of 1455. This would perhaps be an obscure historical detail to the casual observer but it indicates a preeminent Korean role in the history of technology. Jikji actually is in this exhibition, in facsimile form, in a glass vitrine along with some other examples of contemporary Korean publishing lent to the exhibition by the Korean Cultural Centre. The original is safely under lock and key in the Manuscrits Orientaux division of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

Of the more than 7,100 extant languages that could be implicated by the title ‘art and language’, Korean, English and French are the consequence of markedly different traditions. Although classified as a ‘language isolate’ of 87 million speakers, each of whom use the Hangeul alphabet, many theories have been proposed to explain the origin of Korean. The most prominent of these link Korean to the Altaic languages of central Asia, a family that includes Turkish, Mongolian, and the Tungusic (for example, Manchu) languages of Siberia. Quite differently, English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family originally spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England, has 1.4 billion speakers, and is written in the Roman alphabet while French evolved from Gallo-Romance, the Latin spoken in Northern Gaul, and has 97 million native speakers today. Located somewhere along the imprecise intersection of the Korean, English and French traditions is a celebration of Canada/Korea relations.

This exhibition proposes that the vitality of the contemporary works of art+language, informed by Korea’s cultural and artisanal traditions, also betrays an influence of European Modernism, which emerged as a movement in the 1970s when Korean artists began creating meditative works as part of a national healing process in the aftermath of the Korean War. During this time, Korean graphic design began to be influenced by the prevailing Dutch, Swiss and German ‘schools of thought’. Korea has since become, as New York Times critic Jason Farago acknowledged in 2020, “our planet’s current cultural powerhouse.”

The extraordinary experimental and commissioned works of art+language emphatically demonstrate that Korea continues to lead in the cultural and technology sector in extraordinary and admirable ways. It’s been said that there’s typing and then there’s writing. And there’s building and then there’s architecture. And there’s graphic design which can be art.

–Co-curators: Dr. WonJoon Chung (Director & Professor, School of Industrial Design, Carleton University) 

                     Robert Tombs (Curator, Graphic Designer, President of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts) and 

                     Henk van Assen (Senior Critic & Professor, Department of Graphic Design, Yale School of Arts)  

• Kyungsun Kymn, a Seoul-based typographic designer and visual researcher of the Hangeul alphabet who studied in Korea and England, and who is a visiting professor in Ottawa at Carleton University during the 2022–23 academic year.

Kyungsun Kymn’s Reading a City Through Street Signs, 2000 is a series of letterpress-printed post cards expressing the discordant textuality of urban street signs in London, UK. Perhaps Kyungsun’s ‘found’ concrete poetry was a response to the confounding nature of a wholly Englishspeaking environment.  

• Kyung Park, a Toronto-based, US-trained Korean-Canadian graphic designer.

Kyung Park’s extraordinary posters in the 50.25-inch Swiss Weltformat outsize, suggest Korea’s embracing of Swiss Modernism though Kyung’s posters co-mingle with an Asian sensibility.   

• Sulki & Min, Seoul-based artists who studied in Korea, the US, and The Netherlands.

Sulki & Min’s suite of three posters for the Gwangju Biennale 2014 invoke the theme of the Biennale, Burning Down the House, the provocative Talking Heads song title. Sulki & Min were inspired by the dynamic and expansive nature of fire, and co-designed a typographic system, with Shin Shin, a Korean design studio, that included three weights and five different line breaks which allowed their title to occupy as much surface area as possible, in any given space, expressing the expansive nature of fire. 

• Seoul-based Dr. Yongje Lee, a typographic designer who studied in Korea, and has lived in Canada.

Yongje Lee’s poster, Dongdaemun, displays a Hanguel font he created for Dongdaemun Design Plaza, an extraordinary and controversial building designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. The poster includes childrens’ nursery rhymes and the names of local places and community members that were demolished or displaced by its construction.     

• YuJune Park, a US-trained furniture and graphic designer, and partner of Synoptic Office, a New York City design studio. 

YuJune Park’s Swell, recreated here by Henk van Assen, suggests a digital font design reiterated in black electrician’s tape.