Exhibitions

Last week I attended three exhibits in Davis - the UC Davis Design Museum’s Typographic Exploration in Hangul; Hart Hall’s display of works by Florentino Laime Mantilla and Salvador Dali; and the Pence Gallery in downtown Davis. Two of these exhibits were entirely comprised of local artists and designers. The typography display in the Design Museum was of particular interest to me because of its cogency even in another language. Entirely in the Korean script of Hangul, the precise meaning of any of the texts escaped me. But the arrangement of the type forms, alongside short descriptions of the works shed light on an abridged notion of what the scripts held. For example, Phil Choo’s Ileona depicted a three-dimensional representation of a script whose title translated in English means “stand up,” emphasizing some of the characters by seemingly have them standing vertically alongside a mass of characters lying flat. Obviously most of the message was lost on me because of the language barrier, but the graphic design alone brought me a small understanding of the overall message. This exhibit was also of interest for me because of my inability to read the script. I have previously been enamored by design work in foreign languages, such as the poster designs of Russian constructivists like El Lissitzky. With the text incomprehensible, it can give rise to a more diverse number of interpretations. I especially like the Russian and Vietnamese languages for this purpose because they share some, but not all, of their letterforms with the Roman alphabet. The ambiguity is, in my opinion, of great interest.