“Ok, It’s your turn. Please amaze us.” When we got critique in the class, Professor Gruda used to say it. It became one of my driving forces to work more and more. Here is my whole body of work from this semester of Process and Skills. At the very first of semester, I was afraid of handling all the classes that were all new to me. So I struggled a lot while doing Self-Portrait project. I went to three photo booths and ended up with the photos from ace hotel. Only using photocopier and trying proper type for my photo was a big challenge to me at that time. However, from that point, I felt learning by experiencing combining my concept with my work.
The photo essay gave me a chance to use my family’s unused camera and to explore the city a lot. While taking photos, I came up with the idea everything surrounded with us had an eye to watch us. Then it was so much fun to look for all the eyes in the city. Studying design gives me a different view which I’ve never had. With the camera, a lot of familiar things looked different and showed me some meaning. I tried three themes with the hockney-inspired project and finished with two collages which were about Bryant park and 9th path station. I strived for accuracy, and I enjoyed a lot and didn’t notice the time passed, so when i finished it, I felt a pain in my neck and back.:-)
The book binding gave me an opportunity for making a book by myself and exploring different design for its use. Thanks to this, i got to know different kinds of paper, strings, and tools to make a book. It was my first time to sew the paper and make the book with my hands. I found a great fun there. You can see how much I love it.
Through conceptual bottles, I got to learn visualizing the concept into real while sketching more than 25 pairs of bottles. With help of professor, i got the concept for the bottles as Rainbow and Fog. I dyed sand with each color of pigment and dried it up for one day because at my first try, i didn’t dry it up enough, so the colors mixed up inside of the bottle. I had difficulty expressing fog. I searched dry ice and then found it impossible to make it happen. Then I put some smoke with other classmate’s help but it’s gone after 30 minutes. So I used spray paint. I picked the color of pebble to give same consistency with the label.
Finally, the photo book project which I spent the time most and enjoyed most taught me a lot in various aspects. It started with one poem “When I was one-and-twenty” by A.E.Housman. I wanted to put some thoughts on numbers of my life. After deciding the concept, i spent quite a time on the content as well as book’s structure, material, typeface, and composition. The more thoughts i put on the design, definitely the more I learned. I got inspired by the book professor Gruda showed us in the class, so made kind of book sets in the box which had the same concept but in different designs and sizes. I bought iron and ironing each page on the cotton. I struggled with it because I didn’t flip the image reversely. It was good to experience it. Those books were dedicated to my father, so when I made it, I wanted to put something related to him. He liked the red color, so I put different kinds of red strings on both photo books. There’s a korean saying “Everything becomes ash in the end.” Whenever someone desires too much, when we face the death, it fits. So i wanted to put “ash” on my photo book. So I burned the string on one of the books and the edges on the other book.
Throughout the semester, doing research was very time consuming but very helpful. Especially i was new in design and didn’t know any designer and their work. This research helped me a lot and gave me inspiration. Additionally, posting the blog was one of challenges for me because I was afraid of making time for visiting the inspiration places like museum regularly and I wasn’t that confident using English as my expression. However, now I have to say I got a lot from it. Otherwise, I would not have visited all the places and I found some happiness while watching great art work. It absolutely broadened my view. It was such a memorable and great semester.
