Year 1 began by defining my positionality.
I positioned myself as a South Korean illustrator and visual facilitator working across museums and academia. My practice researches socio-political issues, using visual communication as a flexible tool and system to create educational work that invites audiences to rediscover shared realities and participate in collective processes of reimagining our future.
My Unit 2 began with recognising a commonality across my practice. I realised that I often work by translating socio-political issues and revealing the hidden systems of power structures within them. In this process, complex stories, perspectives and visual languages are often flattened into a single representation. For example, the story of my great-grandfather’s journey of carrying his father who was Korean Independence acticist, dead body on his back and wallking back home for 44 days, became a single auditory map.
I began to question what happens when these complex and multiple narratives are compressed into one representation. Focusing on records of my great-great-grandfather’s story, written by Korean and Japanese government at the time, I experimented with creating systems in which different stories and perspectives could exist simultaneously, and with visually folding and unfolding historical narratives that had been flattened through political or linguistic processes.
In my final position-through-essay work, I created a physical mockup of fictional museum in which audiences could move against the routes navigated by the institution, find their own paths, and encounter stories of people who had been marginalised by official history. At the end of the film, however, I also acknowledged myself as a storyteller who, like institutions, edits and selects through an endless process of framing and representation.
The first dialogue: Jayoon Choi
My first dialogue was with Jayoon, who I known for almost 7 years, used to be my tutor back at Camberwell BA Illustration. We share experiences of growing up across different countries as Korean diasporas, as well as backgrounds in illustration and education. I wanted this conversation to allow me to see my practice from a distance through someone who had known my work for several years.
Her view of my positionality was unexpected. She suggested that I have a positionality closer to a director than a practitioner.
A practitioner, in her view, holds onto a particular way of visually translating, observing, depicting, digesting and responding through materials. A director, however, begins with a different question: “How do I communicate?” and “How can I utilise different communication methods that work best to communicate this to the world?”
She described me as more of a conductor than a violinist: someone who brings different elements together, making a system, rather than necessarily playing one instrument themselves.
This made me reconsider what it means for me to make an illustration, and what positionality does my Illustration Itself holds/represent. I realised that I am constantly interested in building systems and asking how relationships between knowledge and stories might be communicated through visual systems, language, metaphors, or different forms of interaction. Rather than developing one consistent visual language, or drawing style, I often move between different methods or metaphors depending on what I am trying to communicate.
This also made me reconsider my position beyond how I communicate and ask why I choose to communicate these particular stories.
Jayoon challenged me to reflect on my position as a Korean diaspora who grew up in Vietnam and later became interested in translating and amplifying histories of political violence, displacement and marginalisation. Why do I feel compelled to bring certain histories into visibility? What does my own cultural and political position allow me to see, and what might it prevent me from seeing? Who am I to unpack and represent these stories?
She encouraged me to spend time asking more fundamental questions about myself: What kind of person am I? What do I want to say about the world? What do I enjoy about drawing? How do I like to communicate? What do I still want to know?
Jayoon also described my practice as an attempt to bring attention to voices that have been marginalised, politically suppressed, or allowed to disappear from public attention. This made me wonder whether illustration could be understood not simply as a way of representing these voices, but as a way of creating more effective conditions for them to be heard.
This led me to a new question: How can I create different conditions for stories, knowledge and voices to be communicated?
Until now, I have often gathered information myself, interpreted it, and translated it into a visual outcome. I began wondering whether I could instead create situations in which people could voluntarily bring information and their own voices into the work. Could participatory or experiential methods allow me to communicate the same subject differently? Could the role of an illustrator be not only to speak on behalf of others, but also to create the conditions through which others can speak?
In this sense, the conversation with Jayoon became my first audience dialogue. It made me realise that dialogue itself could be a communication method.
Dialogue as a method
Following this conversation, I began to treat dialogue itself as a method of practice. Rather than limiting dialogue to conventional interviews, I experimented with different forms of exchange: one-to-one conversations, interviews, exchanging notes, reading and copying texts, and writing questions and responses to myself.
Dialogue became more than a way of gathering information. It became a way of testing how knowledge can move between people, and how different communication methods might produce different understandings of the same subject.
Two dialogues became particularly significant to this enquiry: one with Hyojeong Ahn, a Korean indie-band stage producer and director, and another with Cicely Pilkington, whose MA GCD project How to Diagram explores diagramming as a way of organising and communicating knowledge.
I chose them for different reasons. Hyojeong allowed me to step outside illustration and examine what my emerging “director/conductor” position might mean through another discipline. Cicely, meanwhile, offered a dialogue with someone who shares my background in illustration and education, but who has developed a different approach to visualising and communicating knowledge.
Through these conversations, I want to continue questioning whether my position as an illustrator lies primarily in making images, or whether it might also lie in constructing relationships between people, knowledge, voices, media and audiences.
My Second Dialogue: HyoJeong Ahn
My second dialogue was with Hyojeong Ahn, a stage producer and director working with Korean indie musicians. I wanted to step outside illustration and examine what my emerging “director/conductor” position might mean through another discipline.
Hyojeong distinguishes between society and system through two different metaphors. If society is a living organism that grows organically, a system is closer to a precisely assembled and operated machine. “Society grows, systems are set.” Yet within a system, relationships can still emerge that cannot be fully predicted or controlled.
This made me think about the role of a stage director. Rather than simply directing what happens on stage, the director builds the conditions in which something can happen. Hyojeong describes the director not as someone who unilaterally fills a blank page, but as someone who places elements capable of responding to one another within the same space and creates the conditions for an event to occur.
Her concert series Framing explores this through the relationship between performers and audiences. By deliberately including first-time performers and lesser-known artists, she creates new frames through which audiences can encounter them. Someone who comes to see Artist A may unexpectedly discover and connect with Artist B. The act of selection and arrangement therefore becomes a form of communication: rather than explaining or simplifying an unfamiliar artist, Hyojeong creates a route through which an audience can encounter them.
She also leaves space for both artists and audiences to fill. Although the structure of a performance is carefully planned through line-ups, schedules, rehearsals and technical conditions, what happens within that structure cannot be completely controlled. Mistakes, improvisation, emotional states and audience reactions create moments that only happen because the performance is live.
The director therefore does not determine the outcome. Instead, they construct a system in which different elements can encounter one another and respond. In this sense, I began to see Hyojeong’s practice as a form of conducting: selecting, arranging and connecting, while leaving space for something beyond the director’s control to emerge.
This shifted my understanding of my own practice. If I have been thinking about illustration as a way of communicating stories and knowledge, perhaps my role does not always need to be translating everything myself. It could also involve selecting, arranging and creating the conditions through which people, stories, knowledge and audiences can encounter one another.
The question therefore becomes not only “How do I communicate?”, but also “What conditions can I create for communication to happen?”
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