News — Apr 19, 2024

Grids and glitches beyond boundaries

Graphic designer Hezin O throws all design rules overboard with the presentation BHLNTTTX. In the fifth edition of Post/No/Bills Hezin O fills the niches around the historic staircase with seven colorful wall prints. She challenges conventional notions of graphic design by completely deconstructing her previous works visually and audibly through cutting, repeating, and enlarging.

Photo: Peter Tijhuis

Hezin O aims to symbolically rearrange the existing hierarchy of graphic design. She develops her own grids, deviating from standard grids in design programs such as InDesign, thereby challenging the norm. She also deliberately pushes the boundaries of software by playing with glitches. These are unintended and often surprising errors that sometimes occur when editing images and sounds. Additionally, in the current era of razor-sharp images, she is fascinated by their polar opposite. She creates combinations of offset-printed images with high resolution and images with low resolution from the risograph or stencil machine.

The exhibition title BHLNTTTX embodies an alphabetical rearrangement that strips vowels from the words EXHIBITION TITLE. This mirrors the sense of disassembly and reconstruction inherent in Hezin O’s artistic process.

"I became interested in the error between input and output, and the possibility of imagination of the abstracted results. Since then, interest in abstraction has gradually expanded to interest in various medium units such as text, sound, space, as well as image resolution. When I think about it, graphic design seems to have some characteristics of abstraction in that it compresses or expresses a certain message, and I have always thought that it has a poetic aspect in that respect."
— Hezin O

  • Photo: Peter Tijhuis
  • Photo: Peter Tijhuis
  • Photo: Peter Tijhuis

ABOUT HEZIN O
Graphic designer Hezin O is based in Seoul, South Korea. She studied Visual Communication Design at Hongik University(BA) and University of Seoul(MA). Since 2014, she has been running the design studio OYE. She participated in the Designer in Residence program at the OTIS College of Art and Design (2018, US). In 2020, she was selected as one of the Ones to Watch by It's Nice That, and in 2021, Monthly Design named her as one of the Notable Designer of the Year. She also won the Best Book Design from the Republic of Korea this year and last year. Additionally, her work has appeared in magazines such as idea magazine (JP), Design360° (CN), and GRAPHIC (KR). Her work was also featured in Typojanchi 2019 (2019, KR), Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2021 (2021, KR), and Young Korean Artists 2023 in MMCA Gwacheon (2023, KR).

ABOUT POST/NO/BILLS
The series Post/No/Bills showcases the most recent graphic design projects that respond to current events and developments in the field. BHLNTTTX by Hezin O is the fifth edition of the Post/No/Bills series. Previous editions took place with Kristyan Sarkis, Sophie Douala, Now You See Me Moria, and Metro54.