Author: Jin Seo

I am an illustrator who acts as a conductor rather than a soloist. The verb to conduct, originating from the Latin conducere, means “to lead together” or “to bring together.”

A conductor is not a dictator issuing unilateral commands, but someone who steps directly into the flow of sound, drawing independent agents into a shared resonance. I began this journey through the oral histories of my grandfather, driven by a desire to amplify marginalised peoples, erased memories, and the voices lost in the transmission of history. Illustration often functions as a singular practice, a direct rendering of knowledge or emotion onto a surface. My practice, however, moves closer to that of a director: gathering information, establishing rules, and assigning visual metaphors to create conditions for interpretation. When a sound naturally resonates and reaches deep into an audience, a profound communion forms between the performers and listeners, uniting a collective through shared resonance rather than command. This position led me to question: Could an illustration system move beyond the borders of my canvas to create conditions through which other voices speak?

To explore this, I translated live performance structures into illustrative language, drawing from stage director Hyojeong Yu’s cue sheet framework, which half-fills a blank page with conditions to allow unexpected interactions among performers, audiences, and space. For instance, I mapped the organisational logic of a set list, linking artists to their respective songs, onto narrative structures, translating main characters into specific scenes and events. Inspired by Dogme 95, I established five structural rules for my visual score:

• Duration: Drawing space size is bound to narrative duration.
• Character and Voice: The main character must always appear alongside the main voice (represented as a quarter note), while the chorus (represented as eighth notes) surrounds, echoes, and interrupts the main voice to introduce a collective perspective.
• Framing: Canvas geometry evolves from simple circles to polygons with more vertices as narrative complexity increases.
• Notation: Graphic marks serve as environmental cues rather than descriptive depictions.
• Indeterminate Response: The score leaves structural gaps for participants to fill.

However, implementing these rules immediately raised questions regarding my system’s authority: How firm, yet flexible, should my conditions be? When the relationship between duration and spatial framing becomes overly rigid, the score risks becoming a dictatorial enclosure rather than an inviting stage. Giving a longer narrative more space within a shared drawing area leaves less room for another contribution, directly affecting possibilities elsewhere. Collaboration therefore requires an ongoing act of orchestration: I set the tempo, listen, adjust, and conduct again.

Looking back at Unit 2, I initially treated music as a mechanical translation device. Working with conflicting archival records of my great-great-grandfather, Sang-Mu Seo, an independence activist in Korean accounts but a criminal in Japanese colonial records, I brought a Music Theory Tree into conversation with Borges’s The Library of Babel. Notes identified central figures, modes framed perspectives, and chords brought viewpoints together without forcing resolution. The same fragment could be understood differently depending on the accounts placed beside it.

While this arrangement made room for polyphonic coexistence, I realised a fundamental limitation: I was treating the system as a closed machine, acting as a metaphorical surrogate speaking for others. As I extended this methodology to erased historical narratives, reworking museum floor plans to examine how spatial navigation shapes encounters with history, I confronted my positionality as a Korean diaspora practitioner raised in Vietnam and working in London. Why was I compelled to represent these silenced histories, and through what authority? The route, sequence, and surrounding material were already shaping the encounter before a viewer reached an individual story.

Working across cultures, I navigate dense histories, translating non-linear Korean narratives for international audiences while reframing them for native ones. Musical notation offered a shared language of structure and atmosphere, allowing me to move from speaking alone towards coordinating contributions. My attention shifted towards what happens between them: when they enter, how long they remain, and how one contribution changes the conditions for another.

Minjeong An’s diagram for KoK helped articulate this shift from translating stories into a composed image towards orchestrating contributions. I read her work as treating life itself as a stage, populating symbolic spaces with audiences carrying precise instruments and objects. An brings these elements into a meticulous arrangement for viewers to interpret. My approach asks how such an arrangement might become a score that other makers can act upon, introducing contingency, friction, and collective response. If a participant changes their contribution, what else needs to respond? Which relationships should remain stable, and which could be renegotiated?

The primary limitation of my current work lies in its boundaries. My score proposes a way to coordinate human voices and archival fragments, but it remains untested with other makers. Furthermore, it largely treats surrounding conditions as something I can establish and participants can negotiate. This leaves a critical question: How could the score communicate relationships whose limits are not ours to decide?

Earth system tipping points give this question a specific context. They concern thresholds beyond which change can become self-sustaining, potentially producing cascading effects across connected physical systems. Here, the relationships being represented are non-human physical processes rather than connections established through my visual arrangement. Their timing, uncertainty, and consequences place demands on the score that my existing rules may not accommodate.

Moving forward, I aim to refine this illustration score into a visual instrument for exploring these relationships. Working from selected climate research, makers could develop contributions in which a shift in one element prompts a response elsewhere. The score would need to distinguish researched scientific connections from artistic interpretation and make differences in timescale visible.

Until now, I have gathered, interpreted, translated, and communicated research largely through my own hands and mind. I now want to explore a generative cycle: I construct conditions, others contribute, we encounter one another, and what emerges changes both our understanding and the conditions we began with.

Through this shift, visual metaphors are no longer tools of burden meant to compress heavy information into a single symbolic image that I alone must decode. Instead, they become a conductor’s language, guiding principles that help multiple makers’ works shine in their own directions. True orchestration requires accepting dissonance; an orchestra is not a singular synthesiser playing a pre-programmed track, but independent agents interacting within a shared atmospheric environment.

Ultimately, music became the primary metaphor of my practice because it best enacts a society of togetherness. When the mechanical systems of structure and the organic flow of performance mesh to transmit a shared language, and when that language touches people deeply enough to create a “miracle of resonance”—moving us to act not out of obligation, but out of a shared desire to be together—does the illustrator’s positionality not finally shed its unilateral form and realise itself most powerfully in contemporary society? By moving away from static representation toward open scoring, I stop claiming sole authority to speak for the archive or the planet, and instead design frameworks through which diverse audiences and makers can listen, navigate, and respond to the urgent contingencies of our contemporary context.

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?”

Last week, I noticed that my practice is kinda surrounded by the concept of navigation as a controlled sytem that directs bodies towards intended directions.

I started to do more indept research about navigation and realised Navigation is always followed by movement. Through navigation, movement becomes a process across both time and space, what Adesola Akinleye describes as a form of “four-dimensional distance.” During Unit 2, I began investigating how graphic communication design could use movement to engage with heritage as an active process rather than a fixed historical subject.

I explored my personal family archive, the historical context surrounding it, and the recorded and unrecorded stories of Korean historical figures through different navigational systems: exhibitions, archives, books, captions, and moving image.

Rather than treating these as separate media, I became interested in synthesising them into one continuous movement condition, GPS, exhibition circulation, unfolding books, editing timelines, and audience movement all functioning as connected forms of navigation.

This approach was influenced by artists such as Do Ho Suh, whose work reconstructs home not through fixed representation, but through embodied navigation and spatial memory. 

Also, based on the last week’s feedback on the physical and emotional experience for the audience to experience the distance of memory, absence, and historical fragmentation, I started to think about making physical space that explores how bodies are guided through institutional systems and how audiences might reclaim agency by rerouting themselves through alternative historical paths.

The structure of the video follows a movement progression:

Rather than designing an informational experience, I wanted to design what I describe as an affective navigation condition, a system that changes the audience’s bodily and emotional relationship to history.

The project is structured through three forms of “plotting.” Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, plotting allows me to stage navigable relationships between fragments, voices, spaces, and movements. The focus is not simply what the audience sees, but what state they enter while moving through the work.

Then, I started to Design my museum and exhibition space.

I Visited Foundling Museum, V&A East to Look at the their floor plan and started to develop mine.

 I started to think about how my project began from Babel of library’s room. Using that as the base I started to develop some mockups. I used 3D Rhino to digitally sketch them and then cut out cardboards to build the museum space.

Refined Video Structure

Opening — Arrival

The video begins with a definition of navigation

Navigation search to the National Memorial of the Korean Provisional Government, the institutional site connected to my great-great-grandfather’s archive and the starting point of the project.

Initially I tried making this opening by navigating audience to the foundling museum. 

However, when I talked to Aby, she suggested that the audience should be guided to somewhere incoherent to the subject I am dealing with, people of Korea. Almost like an actual essay briefly informing the audience what will happen in the main body. This made me to shift my Idea and redesign the storyline of the Opening. 

Over these images, GPS navigation line (like a car satellite map) is superimposed, guiding a virtual arrow straight down a linear highway. 

Exciting Korean show “Walking around the world” trade mark song plays. 

Plotting 1 — [FOUND IN MUSEUM] : Guided

Floor Plan 1 Introduced.

The audience enters the museum through a guided route. Floor plans, archival fragments, captions, and audio guides organise the viewing experience into a coherent historical sequence.

Here, I reference Rachel Emily Taylor and her concept of “heritage as process.” Her work analysing erased voices within museum systems shifted my understanding of heritage away from fixed preservation and towards active reconstruction and audience participation.

This section investigates how museums, archives, and graphic systems flatten historical subjects into controlled narratives.

Plotting 2 — [OFF ROUTE] : Rerouting

The audience begins ignoring the official audio guide and moves outside the designated exhibition path.

Floor Plan 2 Introduced.

As the guided route breaks down, hidden narratives emerge: untranslated grief, fragmented testimonies, erased historical figures, gravestones, state records, and unofficial archives. The exhibition becomes overloaded and unstable.

This moment transforms the audience from passive spectators into active participants constructing their own relationships between historical fragments. Navigation becomes an act of resistance.

Plotting 3 — [SENSATION] : Collective Encounter

At this stage, I began questioning whether factual information alone could restore human dignity.

Influenced by Shaun Tan and The Arrival, I became interested in portraiture and illustration as a way to create sensory encounters rather than informational summaries. Illustration became a visual structure capable of holding fragmented voices together without flattening them into a single narrative. Through unfolding illustrated portraits, forgotten voices begin emerging beneath institutional surfaces.

Floor plan 3 introduced.

The accordion pocket-book becomes a navigation system itself: closed, it behaves like an institutional display; opened, hidden narratives unfold beneath it.

Conclusion — [ABSENCE] : The Metacognitive Record

The final section reveals the editing timeline of the video itself.

For the first time, the narration uses “I.”

The audience watches clips being rearranged, muted, deleted, and withheld. The editing process becomes visible rather than hidden.

This reflects my own positionality within the work. I realised that I am not a neutral storyteller documenting history objectively. I am actively selecting, organising, framing, and mediating historical fragments.

Institutions often hide their editing processes behind the appearance of neutrality. I wanted to expose mine.

The video ends with absence itself becoming the final record.

“What is not recorded is not absent. Its absence is the record.”

My Unit 2 expended with a question: How can a visual system hold multiple voices, times, and historical positions without collapsing into a single readable narrative. 

And, ended with a question: How can graphic communication design resist institutional control of heritage by turning archival silence into an act of reconstruction?

Initially, I approached this through my own family history, 80 fragmented slips of paper belonging to my great-great-grandfather. But through my research, I realised that these fragments were already ‘flattened’ by the languages and administrative formats of colonial and state powers.

Heritage as Process

“Rachel Emily Taylor’s concept of ‘Heritage as Process’ was a turning point. I stopped seeing my work as a static family tree and started seeing it as a political engagement with heritage. I realised that the archive is a site of tension between state protection and institutional control. 

Following Shaun Tan’s approach to ‘sensory sensation,’ I decided to focus not on exhaustive data, but on a singular, sensory ‘stab,’ the deep, personal violations that the state’s official vocabulary fails to capture.”

Studio Output: Navigation system to Pocket-Accordion

This led to my physical studio responses:

1. Navigational system: Diagram and Website

2. A ‘Pocket-Accordion’ book. 

It uses a three-layer structure to move the audience from the ‘Official Surface’ (Layer 1) to the ‘Distorted Archive’ (Layer 2) and finally to ‘Critical Fabulation’ (Layer 3).

The physical design forces a dual-directional reading; Korean and English audiences unfold the book in opposite directions, reflecting the untranslatable gap in historical responsibility and emotional debt.

Confronting Feedback: The ‘Political’ & The ‘Silenced Voice’

After my contextualising, I realised in overall my work is actually deeply political. And it is. But I started this work from empathy, not politics. The stories I chose, comfort women survivors, Park Cha-jeong, Yu Gwan-sun, activists who refused state recognition, are political because the state made them political. I didn’t.

Also, my attempt to write neutral captions, I had unintentionally silenced my own voice as a designer. I was trying to let the stories speak for themselves. But neutrality is also a position. And mine was disappearing behind it. These two pieces of ideas kinda led me to think about navigation.

 Redefining Navigation

Navigation, in its technical definition, is the process of monitoring and controlling the movement of a craft or vehicle from one place to another.

As Adesola Akinleye writes in Navigations: Scoring the Moment — curators, engineers, and architects share a common interest in how we direct bodies in what they see, what they hear, and when they stop or start.

I realised that the state’s official history, the museum’s standard tour route, and the GPS system in your car are structurally identical. All three are invisible control systems designed to be followed without question.

And my book, with its layers, its dual directions, its hidden pocket, is also a navigation system. One that asks the audience to question the route. And i wanted to use my video essay to talk about navigation not as a metaphor, but as the literal form of the work.

So through this video, I wanted to explore graphic communication design as a movement choreography as it is a system that directs bodies to certain direction. Reading, watching artwork, national stories are all navigation and neutrality is in-fact an interface that allow frictionless navigation.

Why am I making what I am making?
Throughout Unit 2, I became interested in understanding heritage not as a fixed historical outcome, but as an active and ongoing process. I also began to see systems not as the core of my practice, but as tools for navigating and revealing hidden narratives.

This video became a way of expressing both ideas simultaneously: heritage as process, and navigation itself as a process of questioning, rerouting, and negotiating history. By moving through and against the official navigation system of state-approved history, I wanted to visualise my own act of navigating these stories while encouraging the audience to actively reroute themselves in order to encounter suppressed and erased voices.

Video Essay Concept: Rerouting History

The video essay will be titled ‘Rerouting Navigation.’

It will mimic a car’s GPS system. A cold, mechanical English voice will act as the institutional guide, instructing the audience to ‘Proceed straight on the approved highway of history.’ However, the narrative will be disrupted by a ‘Critical Malfunction,’ the sound of human, Korean voices inside the car deciding to ignore the GPS. ‘The official highway doesn’t have the voices we need,’ they say. ‘Turn the wheel.

Phase 1: The Functional Interface (0:00 – 0:50)

1. The video opens in absolute silence. A screen-recording of Adobe InDesign or Illustrator. The mouse cursor adjustments grids, lines, and folding marks on an accordion layout. Improving the navigation of the book.
2. Then, a dictionary definition of “Navigation” fades in over the digital workspace: “Navigation: A field of study that focuses on the process of monitoring and controlling the movement of a craft or vehicle from one place to another.”

Critical Context: It demonstrates that the functionality of reading is also ‘functional navigation’ controlled by the movement path designed by the designer. Showing the journey i took to answer the question of How can I guide the audience through the book without letting them get lost?

Phase 2: The Controlled Heritage (0:50 – 1:40)

1. The digital workspace fades out, dissolving into sterile, well-lit museum display cases, official state portraits, and clean administrative archives (Layer 1).
2. Over these images, GPS navigation line (like a car satellite map) is superimposed, guiding a virtual arrow straight down a linear highway. The navigation voice continues, but now it’s guiding through history.
3. The audience is following a route designed by the state. Without question. Text from Adesola Akinleye’s Navigations emerges as a subtitle:“Curators and engineers share a common interest: how we create movement… how we direct bodies in what they see, what they hear, and when they stop or start.”

Critical Context: audience began to realise that the essence of navigation is about directing the body, where to move, what to look at, and when to stop. This led me to connect the standard viewing routes of museums and officially sanctioned national histories (Layer 1) as forms of carefully controlled navigation systems.

It exposes that while it may appear peaceful like ‘Walking Around the World,’ the nation’s official history and museum tour routes are a massive control system orchestrated to force audience to consume what they intended.

Phase 3: The Critical Malfunction (1:40 – 2:50)

1. GPS line suddenly glitches, flickers, and shakes. The sterile museum images fracture into chaotic, overlapping visuals. Raw, unedited Korean voices inside a car): Conversational, human Korean voices cut in, as if we are sitting inside a moving car) ‘이리로가는게맞아?’ ‘지도에는이게전부야.’ ‘근데저기길이또있어.’ ‘경로를이탈했습니다. 재탐색합니다.’ 
2. Layer 2 opens. The cracks appear. Park Cha-jeong’s gravestone. The Catholic funeral that was refused. Three thousand people reduced to a crowd. Korean and English begin to mix.

• 탑승자 A: “이리로 가는 게 맞아? 내비대로 가고 있어?”
• 탑승자 B (디자이너 본인의 생생한 목소리): “아니. 내비가 가라는 고속도로에는 할아버지의 진짜 목소리가 없어. 가부장제가 지워버린 여성들의 이름도, 서류가 없어서 국가가 인정하지 않은 수많은 사람들의 진짜 서사도 다 이 깔끔한 도로 밖에 버려져 있어. 나 내비 무시하고 이 80개 종이 쪼가리 밑으로 갈래. 핸들 꺾어.”
• English GPS Voice (Distant, muffled, panicking): “Rerouting. Make a U-turn into the approved archive. Rerouting…” (The voice snaps off into static)

Critical Context: At this point, the passengers inside the vehicle, the designer and the voices themselves, begin to “reroute.” By refusing the predetermined navigation system (the official national record) and turning instead toward shortcuts and side roads (the 80 fragmented paper pieces and hidden voices), the film shifts from a simple instructional guide into a video essay that creates fractures within the system itself.

Phase 4: Outro (3:30 – 3:50)

1. The navigation voice returns. ‘You have arrived at the destination. Navigation Ended.’
2. The screen goes dark. Then text appears slowly.
3. All navigational techniques involve locating the navigator’s position compared to known locations. What if the location is not on the map? What if it was removed?
4. A close-up of one of my great-great-grandfather’s 80 slips of paper.
5. ‘This is where it started.’
6. The book closes. Screen black.”
7. What is not recorded is not absent. Its absence is the record.”

Feedback

• There is something ‘playful’ in my work, maybe show that a bit more?
• Actually adapting or introducing the actual ‘Folding’ somehow.
• Want to see something more ‘Physical.’ My work has a really strong physical element, and the video should show that too.
• Maybe doing an actual mockup of the exhibition space? Current digital visual language does not incorporate my exploration of unit 2 very well.

Last week’s tutorial, there were three main concerns/ideas raised:

• Problem 1: The Necessity of a Physical Object: A project about “unfolding” couldn’t just remain a flat digital layout or a basic booklet. I needed a physical mechanism where the form itself reflected the tension between state control and personal memory.
• Problem 2: Information Overflow: For instance, in the “Comfort Women” archive, there were too many heavy stories—the denial of a Catholic funeral, the embezzlement of funds, the abandonment of relics. Trying to show everything especially to foreign audience kind of made the narrative feel overwhelming.
• Problem 3: The Divided Audience: Who is this archive for? The background knowledge and emotional baggage of a Korean audience and an international audience are completely different. Korean viewers often feel fatigued by overexposed historical narratives, while international viewers lack the basic historical context entirely.

solution to problem 1&3:

I initially tried different types of according forldings and see what would be the best. 

but then, i found this project by Atta Kwami’s ‘Grace Kwami Sculpture’, a leporello bound book designed to unfold and stand on its edge. and I thought maybe I can I adapted this into a “Pocket-Accordion” structure.

I started some sketches. I adapted this into my own structure.

An A3 sheet, folded into a pocket, with specific creases cut so that the book can only be fully read from one direction at a time. When closed, it feels cold and rigid, like a museum specimen box. But when unfolded, three layers of truth emerge. The single sheet of paper represents the oneness of the archive, but the folds create multiplicity. it kinda responds to my enquiry as the paper resists being opened, just as the institution resists being questioned.

• Layer 1: The official surface. State-approved portraits and formal captions. Authoritative. Complete. 
• Layer 2: The distorted archive. The same people, but now the cracks begin to show. What the institution silenced.
• Layer 3: Critical Fabulation. Based on Saidiya Hartman’s idea of filling the gaps with imagination, but never hiding that it is imagination.  A restorative space created by the designer, not a discovered fact.

Critical Positionality of the Structure

This physical limitation became a conceptual strength. The book can only be read from one direction at a time.

Korean and English readers unfold the book in opposite directions. They can never share the same frame. Each must reconstruct the history from their own position.

And the captions are different too, not just in language, but in role. Korean captions speak directly, quietly, like someone whispering something you already knew but chose to forget. English captions are like a film narration. 

At this point, I decided the inner pocket opens only from the Korean side. Because the weight of responsibility is different. For an international audience, this is a universal human rights issue, empathy. But for a Korean audience, we are the accomplices. We allowed this state violence to be silenced. The inner pocket contains what cannot be translated, a private space that resists the institution’s power.

Solution to Problem 2:

Last week’s feedback raised the issue of information overflow. Too many heavy stories at once. I spoke with the curation team at the museum about this.

Scientific curation aims for classification and preservation, erasing the curator’s voice to appear objective. Like Louis Agassiz’s fish catalogue. but Art curation, as Rachel says, is about looking after, keeping the context alive.

Then I looked at Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.

It starts with portraits of immigrants at the very start of the book and then open up the story of Four or five different immigrant stories. No words at all. And yet it never feels overwhelming. Because Shaun Tan doesn’t give information. He gives sensation. You don’t need the historical context to feel the human soul.

This led me to use my drawing style as a bridge. Instead of displaying full information on layer 1 surface, maybe I can draw their portraits, the formal “Official National Portrait”, Like the specimens in the display case and making audience to feel and experience the ‘exhibition’ all align as human story, but then layer 2 opens.

Information Compression: I realised that listing every tragedy (embezzlement, relics, funerals) was just repeating the same sentence: “They controlled us in the name of protection.” Like Shaun Tan, I decided to focus on one singular, sensory event of person or story, for example the denial of the Catholic funeral.

This one deep “stab” is more powerful than a list of administrative complaints. It allows the audience to perform their own critical fabulation by filling in the gaps.

Typography

For typography I used Nanumyethangeul, which is given out by korean heritage foundation to keep the old korean hand writing.

The creators of this font wanted to ensure that the ‘original forms’ of our language are not forgotten. By applying this to my project, the typography itself becomes an act of archiving. It allows me to use the very tool of our cultural heritage to restore the voices that were silenced by the state. It is not just text; it is a digital monument to the language of our ancestors.

The Four Stories

So the book contains four panels.

1. The first is Lee Ok-seon, a comfort women survivor.
   Her portrait smiles. Open the fold, and her lifelong Catholic faith was replaced, at the moment of her death, by a Buddhist ceremony decided by others. Open further, and you see the life she should have had. A quiet room. Photographs on the wall. Ordinary warmth she was never allowed to keep.
2. The second is Park Cha-jeong. Her portrait is steady and clear. Open the fold, and her gravestone does not carry her name as an activist. It reads: Wife of General Kim Won-bong. Open further, and you see the gravestone that should have existed. Her name, alone, carved clearly.
3. The third is Yu Gwan-sun. The most perfectly flattened figure in Korean history. Open the fold, and she was virtually unknown before liberation. She was selected for the textbook because someone needed a Korean Joan of Arc. Her image was weaponised by the Park Chung-hee regime. On the day of her protest, there were 3,000 people at Aunae Marketplace. One name was recorded. The rest became a crowd. Open further, and you see those 3,000 faces. Unnamed. But there.
4. The fourth panel is empty. A portrait frame with no one inside. Because the fourth story belongs to those who refused to be recognised — independence activists who rejected state medals because they would not let the Park Chung-hee regime, built on a foundation of collaboration, decide what their resistance was worth. Open the fold, and you find the administrative machinery of recognition. Open further, and the empty chair remains. The absence is not a mistake. It is the loudest thing in the room.

The most officially presented things erase the most.

A museum case pins a living thing behind glass and calls it preservation. A national curriculum selects one name from three thousand and calls it history. A sanctuary takes in survivors and calls it protection.

My work asks the audience to open the case. To unfold the surface. To find what was placed underneath, not by accident, but by choice.

The act of folding is the point at which graphic design stops being a tool of flattening, and becomes an act of resistance.

What is not recorded is not absent. Its absence is the record.

What I realised during Positions Through Iterating was that I enjoy assembling fragmented stories to construct new forms of narrative.

At first, I thought the system itself was becoming the core of my practice. I built structures, rules, and iterative frameworks to hold multiple perspectives together.

But eventually I realised something important: the system is not the centre of my practice. I am interested in systems as tools for storytelling, as conditions that allow hidden or flattened stories to emerge.

As I researched further, I realised that what I thought was a family story was actually something larger. It was about heritage, and specifically, about how heritage is made.

I looked at references like:

• Rachel Emily Taylor — Heritage As Process: Constructing The Historical Child’s Voice Through Art Practice.
  
  Based at the Foundling Museum, the project critiques how children’s histories are often told through adult voices. It identifies a key issue: children are largely voiceless in museum narratives, as history is preserved by adults for them. Using art practice as a method, Taylor reconstructs the child’s voice through workshops involving role-play, empathy, and making. The outcomes are tested through curated artworks within the museum and explores how museums can move from singular, institutional narratives to multiple, coexisting voices, and proposes art as a tool to reframe historical voice and agency.
  
• Yeni Kim — Tamnarok: The Record of Tamna.
  
  A practice-based research project exploring illustration as a tool to manifest intangible cultural heritage, focused on endangered cultural forms: Haenyeo 해녀 and the Jeju language 제주방언. She identifies a generational gap, cultural knowledge is fading due to disengagement of younger generations, and positions illustration as a method to examine lived experience and activate cultural understanding. Her methods include drawing during interviews to visualise verbal narratives, workshops with children to deepen engagement, and translating outcomes into a picture book using the Jeju language. The work demonstrates illustration as a generative, not just representational, tool, sustaining culture as lived and living, not fixed or archived.
  
• Do Ho Suh — Walk the House.
  
  Suh explores home, identity, and memory through installations, drawings, and video, rooted in the Hanok, the Korean traditional house, a structure that can be disassembled and relocated, symbolising mobility and migration. His ongoing Bridge Project investigates the idea of a “perfect home” intersecting with social, political, and ecological realities. Themes of migration, displacement, and memory extend beyond national boundaries, using personal experience to trigger collective resonance. The work demonstrates how private stories can become shared experiences, and actively encourages audience participation through memory recall.

All of them approached heritage not as a fixed subject, but as a process, through participation, making, and engagement. Their work wasn’t about presenting a finished narrative. It was about constructing, questioning, and experiencing. And I realised I was doing the same thing. But with difference. They worked within institutional frameworks. I wanted to break them. 

This made me realise that my work, which I had previously thought of as simply a “family story,” is in fact dealing with heritage, specifically, heritage as a process. This explains the tension I had been experiencing between emotion and logic, between storytelling and system. Heritage itself exists within this tension. It is shaped by preservation and control, but also by memory, emotion, and interpretation.

At first, I wanted to explore this through DNA as a metaphor for inherited memory and transmission. But I realised that I was already dealing with histories that were incredibly dense and difficult. Adding another scientific framework risked distancing the work even further. So instead, I decided to empty my head and return to something more direct: my own heritage, my family history, and the structures surrounding it.

Every document left behind by independence activists, including my great-great-grandfather, was written by someone else. Korean, Japanese, Chinese, descendants. The activists’ own voices are absent. What remains are fragments: pieces of paper, in different languages, shaped by different political conditions. 

And this is not just a problem of the past. After liberation, the Korean state continued to choose which stories to keep and which to erase.

Socialist activists were excluded due to Cold War politics. Women’s contributions were recorded only as supporting their husbands. Survivors like the comfort women grandmothers were officially commemorated — and simultaneously controlled. The archive was never neutral. It was always already a form of power.

This led me to my critical enquiry:

How can graphic communication design resist institutional control of heritage by turning archival silence into an act of reconstruction?

And my positionality:

As both a granddaughter descended from the subject and a graphic designer assembling fragmented archives, I occupy a dual position, simultaneously inside the inheritance and outside the historical record, making my act of reconstruction neither neutral nor complete.

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Responding Prompt 3: Translate the reference into a new medium in order to introduce it into a different (but specific) context. Consider various methods of translation, such as: copying, parodying, relaying, interjecting, extrapolating, hybridizing, paraphrasing, etc.

For Prompt 3, I translated Rachel Emily Taylor’s methodology into a new medium and a new context.

Rachel’s starting point was the museum caption. She worked within the institution, restoring unheard voices through workshops, then re-curating them back into the museum space. She resisted from inside the frame. I wanted to break the frame itself.

Rachel uses the Scottish definition of curating — to look after.

My version of curating is also to look after — but in the sense of to look after what has been left behind, to search for, uncover, and reveal. To find what the institution chose not to keep.

Looking at the venice table by wolfman gang’s venice table I started to think about how I can make the audience to look after what has been left behind, to search for, uncover, and reveal. To find what the institution chose not to keep.

Working at a museum, I photographed one of the display cases, a Victorian specimen case titled “FORE LIMB OR WING.”

Objects pinned down, labelled, arranged behind glass. A life reduced to a caption.

This image became the starting point for my method: folding.

I wanted to reconstruct the flattened heritage into a living narrative by transforming the static archival system into a dynamic, ‘folding’ process that synthesises fragmented data into a functional organic whole.

I started to explore this idea with a single sheet of paper, folded, cut, and layered, that functions as both a display case and an archive.

On the surface, it looks exactly like an official exhibition. Authoritative. Complete. The kind of display a national museum would be proud of. But the folding structure means it can be opened. And the act of opening is itself a critical gesture. The audience doesn’t passively view, they physically break the institutional surface to reach what lies beneath. Each layer has a title that shifts as you go deeper.

Unfolding each Layers

Layer 1: Those Who Are Remembered — the official surface. Recognised figures, formal captions, state-approved narratives.

Layer 2: Those Who Are Not Remembered — the same people, but the cracks begin to show. The same figures, the same spaces — but what the institution chose not to say.

Layer 3: Those Who Refused to Be Remembered — critical fabulation. Voices that were never recorded, written in the absence of a record. Based on Saidiya Hartman’s concept: filling the gaps with imagination, but never hiding that it is imagination.

The Stories

I started to do some research on Korean historical figures, who were represented by Korean Institution, and explored how they were presented. Then, I started to look at their stories that were not selected by the institution to be presented.

I then tested this the folding structure across four stories I found.

The first is the comfort women grandmothers and the House of Sharing. On the surface: a sanctuary, a symbol of remembrance, 155 Statues of Peace installed worldwide. Underneath: of 8.8 billion won raised in donations, only 200 million reached the survivors. A devout Catholic grandmother was given a Buddhist funeral against her wishes. Her belongings were left in a car park, covered in plastic, in the rain. The story the institution told and the story the grandmothers lived were not the same story.

The second is Park Cha-jeong. On the surface: a recognised independence activist, awarded the Order of Merit in 1995. Underneath: her gravestone does not bear her name as an activist. It reads, Wife of General Yaksan Kim Won-bong.Fifty years of suppression because her husband defected to the North. The critical fabulation: a revised gravestone. The one that should exist, but doesn’t.

The third is Yu Gwan-sun. On the surface: the most perfectly flattened figure in Korean history. One photograph. A few lines. A complete heroic narrative. Underneath: she was virtually unknown before liberation. She was selected for the textbook because someone was looking for a Korean Joan of Arc. Her image was used by the Park Chung-hee regime to justify nationalist unity. On the day of her protest, there were 3,000 people at Aunae Marketplace. One name was recorded. The rest became a crowd.

Lastly, Its all the activist who refused to be represented as an ‘Official Independence Activist’ as they felt like they were being used for political purposes.

Here is the final outcome:

Feedbacks

Positive

• Critical fabulation’s visual quality is really strong. 
• Cosidering my position within the practice is also very strong. evolving nicely and differently.

Negative

• Maybe having actual physical object? documents that folds out?
• Consider having both Korean and English. Two audience have completely different understanding of these subject. Maybe having different captions?
• Information density & richness is a lot, but maybe there is too much story? consider how I can use graphic communication design as a tool to making it interesting
• Something about Museum display makes it more easy for audience to embrace all the information on the spot and all of them are the ‘Wings’.
• Materiality super important. How I might present this to people, visual language. How do i want it to feel and come across. 
• Consider adapting Korean typeface.

Video Essay:

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Written Response: