Moon Jung Jang
Associate Professor
University of Georgia

My creative practice focuses on the simultaneous, multiple existences of mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about unseen things and their information. To understand such a phenomenon, I explore multiplicity as a visual concept and as narrative systems to capture the multiple existences in space-time. My design methodology is as follows: First, I select a group of interrelated unseen things and intangible information, such as temperature, labor, and alignment, that could be meaningful in my daily life. Second, I examine visual qualities that could consist of multiplicity, such as simultaneity, duality, polyhedral-ness, ambivalence, and modularity. Third, I design visual narrative systems to translate or transfer intangible information into metaphoric modules, sequential colors, and their values.

The design outcomes of my work are realized through custom display typefaces, prints, posters, small books, animations, and mixed media, which generate a network of connections between projects. For example, one project, A Sequence of Gray, consists of a book, a series of posters, and an animation that demonstrated the concept of ambivalence and gray gradients as narrative systems to translate the simultaneous existence of black and white. It led to A Sequence of Blue: Labor Day, an installation that translates my unseen laboring time into sequential blue values. In conclusion, this creative practice of multiplicity has allowed me to examine paradoxical, polyphonic, and metaphoric sequences in designing visual narratives and to have active perspectives to understand the unseen.

References

Kenneth Weisbrode, On Ambivalence, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2012

Mari Carmen Ramirez, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color, London & Huston, 2007

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for The Next Millennium, Vintage Books, New York, 1988

This design research is presented at Design Incubation Colloquium 11.1: Boston University on Friday, October 25, 2024.