Glitchy grids and cut and paste prints: Hezin O’s exhibition is where graphic design rules go to die

Often as creatives we can feel quite precious about our past work. It might be hard to revisit previous projects – things we’ve moved on from and now feel impossible to imagine in any other form than the way they ended up. So we might keep our neat archive of past projects largely untouched, with our focus forever fixed on our next creative venture.

For Seoul-based graphic designer Hezin O, however, past projects are part of a rich tapestry of material, ready to be deconstructed. Through a process of cutting, repeating, reusing and enlarging elements of previous projects from 2019 to date, the designer has created a wonderfully glitchy, abstract display of artworks on show at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam for the 5th edition of Post/No/Bills, a series of showcases that highlight graphic design projects responding to current events and developments in the field.

Since we last caught up with the designer in 2020, as part of our Ones to Watch series, she spoke about her view on graphic design as a process of translation, she has been continuing to shake things up creatively. This latest exhibition is a new extension of her embracing of glitch, error and all things transformative and unexpected. “I have always been interested in discovering or creating abstract pieces that slightly deviate from their intended use and inspire imagination, such as ghostly images that have obscured the original due to low resolution, as well as contextualisation through editing techniques and unfamiliar combinations caused by errors,” Hezin tells us.

Using a mix of Offest and Risograph printing, tor this display Hezin O has collaged, copied and rescaled “randomly selected graphic fragments, and pages, from posters, books and leaflets”, from her designs over the years. However, before they became the colourful patchwork quilt of prints that are currently on show, these reorganised works initially started within the pages of a book: Reprint.

A publication made by Hezin earlier this year, Reprint acted as a vessel for her to gather all these fragments of projects together by placing pieces over an extensive 128 pages, in no particular order. The book itself was then deconstructed and the pages printed over to create a new series of graphic artworks: “As a result, a number of different combinations of the first Offset-printed side and the second Riso-printed side were created. In other words, the result is not the original work as it is, but rather an extraction of parts of it, or a random re-gluing of different works,” she says.

Another key element to the exhibit was the designers’ adornment of the gallery walls with a layer of complex colourful grids of varying sizes, that “throw all design rules overboard”, skewing and stretching established visual hierarchies from former projects. Overlayed on her eclectic grids, Hezin merged digital artworks into the display, referring to the concept of glitches, “such as an error screen, disassembled images and a beat made by twisting or cutting a normal sound source, and gaps between normal operations.”

Rather than limiting graphic design to the act of input and output or “departing from content and arriving at a fluent visual language”, by celebrating glitches, errors and digital disturbances Hezin demonstrates that the questions, research and learning that come out of a process are perhaps more important than their results. “I would like to describe the spectrum of my work as exploring the mindset, ideas, methods, attitudes, and possibilities of graphic language rather than limiting it to the act of ‘good translations’ that conveys content well,” she says, “However, this exhibition is by no means a conclusion to this idea – an exhibition should never show a conclusion, but rather a set of follow up questions.”