Jinyoung Joung – Following Ideograms

Korean designer Jinyoung Joung explores the characters of human language. She follows their traces all over the world, travels to China to learn the highly complex sign writing, and explores the past of the characters and their transformation over the centuries. Like an archaeologist she detects long-forgotten typescript, by giving them new meaning and forming typologies. She creates a sort of iconography taking this term literally. Aby Warburg, an art historian concerned with cultural studies, established this term at the beginning of the 20th century. By collecting, comparing, researching, and contexualizing and not least by his intuition, he succeeded to reveal the original meaning of images and symbols, whose outer form had changed over the centuries. Joung follows in his footsteps. She collects characters and finds hidden connections as shown in her work "A Look at the Sun in Various Scripts." The symbol for the sun, strikingly similar to the meaning depicted in independent cultures, suggested that there must be a universally understood sign language that every person can understand, at any age regardless of their education. Warburg drew the same conclusion. Joung gathers her research results in elaborate books with an infinitely clear and minimalist aesthetic. Her work "Knitting Book" must be regarded as highlight: a whole book on one sheet. Each time a paper strip from the grid is pushed further, the new grouping of the glyphs forms another story. In a system with up to 10,000 individual characters, the combination possibilities are endless.

The columns and rows of Yi glyphs printed are seen on the two pieces of paper. From this one pair, a story can be generated as you move a row of glyphs all the way across along the fixed columns. Moreover, if you bring another row of glyphs, this one page book tells another, and another, different story. Isn’t it amazing? – Jinyoung Joung

Jinyoung Joung received her BFA from Seoul National University (SNU), Seoul, Korea in 2004 and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Chicago, IL in 2011. Since 2001 her works were shown in several exhibitions in the U.S., Europe and Korea, and her academic paper "Ideograms in the digital age" will be published in Korea Design Knowledge Journal this September. She lives and works in Chicago.

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