JIKJI The Golden Seed
Client: Cheongju City
Location: Cheongju Arts Centre, South Korea
Year: 2016
Brief: Spatial design of an exhibition in celebration of metal type printing and its far-reaching influence on all the various forms of communication that have followed.
The Exhibition explored the history of human communication, from the spoken word to the digital revolution and beyond.
The exhibition was the brainchild of esteemed cultural curator Dr. Stephanie Seungmin Kim, founder and CEO of ISKAI Contemporary Art. It included historical artefacts and treasures alongside contemporary digital inventions, paintings, and sculptures. Commissioned artists included William Kentridge, Ron Arad, Choi Jeong Hwa, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Marshmallow Laser Feast, Leenam Lee, and Kyungtack Hong. Significant historical objects displayed included the Gutenberg Printing Machine and the Guttenberg Bible.
The project had a limited construction budget. The site was an architecturally unremarkable municipal theatre built in the 1970s, and our design needed to draw focus away from these surroundings. We used dynamic physical interpretation and curation of the objects and artworks to immerse the visitor in a memorable and engaging story.
To achieve this, we created a series of simple but striking display structures in a clear visual language inspired by the works on show. These structures created a coherent landscape against which the narrative could unfold.
They were part of a wider approach in which we flooded the building with a layer of red. The provocative shade ran along the floor and up any walls or structures that displayed content, wrapping around and uniting all the different elements while helping to support the curated flow of information and highlighting meaning and interpretation.
The specific red was chosen for its cultural ties to Korea and its visual strength – equal to that of black – allure and drama. It was instrumental in our design, instantly transforming the space from an unused theatre to a gallery with an immersive, emotional quality.
The site presented a number of challenges, installing the exhibition in a non-gallery space with low ceilings meant that we needed to make the most of the available floor space to hold graphics, support orientational interventions and hold content displays while allowing tactile exploration of the red that tied each element together. A wave of rich red carpet announced your arrival in the exhibition and carried you forward, arresting red graphics informed you of what was taking place all around you, eye-catching totems clearly explained each zone, while floor-based captions described the details of each single project.
