Photography by Hoon Kim
Indeed, why not smile when you view Hoon Kim’s work? Hoon Kim, a Korean graphic designer working and residing in New York City typifies the resonating effect Korean Graphic Design is having as another rising force in this design medium. Reiterated by John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the current latest issue of global affairs publication Monocle, the intellectual playfulness often reserved for the Dutch scene is questioning the everyday conventional governance of how contemporary practices are approached. Kim’s work is invariably different as the derivative and embellishments design elements are non-existent. Instead, produced outcomes in the form of printed matter spanning across posters, binded books and new media are carefully renditioned that results in the culmination of critical analysis, the way in which human interactivity responses to the outside world through sound, colour and our social vernicular. Examples of his work including ‘Walk On Red’, ‘Audio Signals’ and ‘I Am The Place Where I Am’ all informatively layer a concise graphic format. Walk On Red describes and expresses a visual sequence whereby Kim’s New York neighbourhood experience in noise complaints is the interrelation of public and private space. Kim houses specific locations which he addresses by depicting beacon patterns in greyscale photographed topologies of Provedance. Not only has he been able to translate the mental and aural messages as something physical in print, the intricacies of public space through sound performance as an example of new media is as in-depth and spectacular. The Voice Visualiser is a cone-shaped megaphone with a projector, microphone and video receiver built inside. The megaphone’s pictorially digitised response is the tone, pitch and clarity of voice speech delivered by the user of the device. The megaphone amplifies the sound or de-sensitises the volume by a transculent screen, reactionary to a spectrum of colour, a spirograph or pixel patterns. Hoon Kim’s ability to fundementally visualise and translate semiotic elements in personal connections that are rhetorically responsive shows his clear intent to refresh the common, constructed delivery of digital manipulated images.
May 10, 2009
