1. Graphic design is the art of organizing visual symbols

Graphic design constructs itself with a visual language that corresponds to the complexity of relationships which we are already sensible with in life. Using shapes, colors and, sometimes, the element of time, this visual language can indirectly mimic or invent objects, feelings, and situations. People, such as graphic designers, interpret and represent these materials over flat surfaces.

Frequently, graphic design has been mis-introduced as simply a range of applications including typography, print, identity, video, interactive media etc. At other times, graphic design has been mis-equated to the creative idea. Regardless of the application or the idea, graphic design is, first and foremost, a carrier of intricate visual symbols united by a coherent logic.

Different applications of graphic design emphasize a different involvement to the notion of visual symbols. For example, conventional typography is inherently closer to linguistics, while identity design is closer to semiotics—for the freedom of additional visual marks it can employ. Graphic design operates like a hidden hand that supplies existing symbols with a stronger description by the way in which they are combined. It is the meta reservoir standing by.

2. I make graphic design to expand an aura

Always embodied to the surface of physical beings, graphic design has no dimensionality. This is the same attribute that also makes it easily seize the bulk of our everyday vision. Graphic design floats on every plane it finds its way to. Already highly plastic and manipulable in nature, graphic design is, at the same time, a medium with great potential to reshape our seen environment.

Unlike art, graphic design explicitly initiates an external dialogue by utilizing visual symbols and structures that are built universally. It melts with our loose memory and unfolds meanings and emotions accordingly. Every part of a piece of graphic design has as strong a relationship to the particulars of reality as to another part within the design.

I make graphic design with the awareness of the relationship it has to extrinsic references. The constellation of patterns that graphic design shares with the universe gives each work a distinct aura. Like a garden or a chair, graphic design offers us a mixture of form, color, human touch, and natural force—it has the ability to move us. I push for the full extent of this capacity.

1. 平面设计即视觉符号之组织艺术。

构成平面设计中的视觉语言直接对应于我们生活中已感知的复杂关系。这种视觉语言可以透过形状、色彩、以及时而的时间因素，间接地模仿或创建物体、感情及情形。平面设计者等人群则在有表层的平面体上诠释并表现这些内容。

往往，平面设计过于简单地被误归类为一系列的应用产品，包括排版、印刷、标识、视频、互动媒体等。另外，平面设计还常被误等同于富有创意的想法。抛开它的应用与思想，平面设计首先是一个由贯穿的逻辑所统一的精细的视觉符号载体。

不同的平面设计范畴突出不同形式的视觉符号的参与。例如，传统的排版本身更接近语言学，而标识设计更接近于符号学，因为后者可以自如地利用更多的视觉记号。平面设计的运作就像一只幕后的手，它通过重组现有的符号为它们提供更强烈的刻画。它是一座属性后备库。

2. 我做平面设计，是为了延展某种气息。

平面设计始终具体化于物质的表层，它没有维度。也正是这种特性使它轻易地占据了我们大量的日常视觉景象。平面设计漂浮在一切它所能触及到的平面体上。由于它高度的可塑性与操控性，平面设计是一支具备重塑我们视觉环境的巨大潜力之媒介。

不同于艺术，平面设计通过运用普遍建立起的视觉符号与构造，启动一桩桩明确的外部对话。它与我们松动的记忆融于一体，从而流露出其相应含义和情感。平面设计作品中的每一个部分都拥有与现实的特定的有力联系，如同与作品中其它部分之间的联系一样。

我带着对于它与外界参照关系的意识从事平面设计。每个平面设计都与宇宙的某种群体规律相重叠，从而获得其独特的氛围。平面设计如同一个花园或一把椅子，为我们提供一种混合体，包含形、色、人的参与、以及自然力。它有能力感染我们。我力求最大限度地推动这种能力。

‘Day 10062′ <第10062天> (08’02)
2008, Salzburg

Pictures, written languages, moving pictures, and constructed environments reveal stages in the development of image technology.

These formats, as means of expression in graphic design today, make it possible to preserve a focused representation of elements set in some relationship, isolated from the natural world. In other words, they act as a lens filter to a projected world that counter weighs the details of existing reality, similar to when an accidental sunbeam lights up an unnoticed area of a face.

The word nature bears two common meanings under our current usage: the nature that refers to the external world in its entirety; and the nature that refers to the inherent character or basic constitution of a person or thing. The actual word nature comes from Latin word natus, past participle of nasci—to be born. During early 12th century, the definition of nature has meant the active force that establishes and maintains the order of the universe, group of properties, or characteristics that define objects. (*OED)

Visual order is at the heart of the graphic     design discipline. Graphic design embraces a multidisciplinary range of visual modes, and is as much ideal for the investigation of the process of seeing as is for the development of alternative ways of seeing. Particular modes such as prints, books, videos, and interactive interfaces extend and help us understand our ability to capture and carry imagery, motion, and meaning.

As someone who instrumentalizes these     resources, I am especially concerned with seeing, and thus I focus my thesis around the notion of seeing and providing ways of seeing. I am especially interested in how a form can become a poetic and expressive entity that in turn influences its content and enliven the act of looking.

My work in the past two years has consisted mostly of reactions against the notion of a singular focus. Conventional thinking has resulted in the expectation that graphic design occupies only what is ‘flat’. This compressed quality has a bizarre similarity to the ‘flat’ relationship that the majority of graphic design bears to society as a service to the creation of mediated messages.

When graphic design works for the benefit of commercial or political objectives, it can not avoid but strip down the polarity of content into a single-minded voice. This over-powering dominance has affected the general understanding of what graphic design is and what it can be.

I attempted to build a more comprehensive understanding of the interrelated web that the man-made visual mediums hold. As an investigator into the basics of visual representation essentially, I tried to not use these forms to communicate messages, but rather, somehow, I tried to live in these forms in order to develop a more acute and organic awareness.

I chose to work with subjects that I have     taken for granted in the past, notions and habits that have entered my system unconsciously to make me function better without thinking about them. By having subjects such as air, the alphabet system, or color, I tried to find visual forms that     reverberate preconceived ideas by relating back to them in some physical way. My other experiments have taken inspiration from paper, coin, and the discarded popsicle stick.

The work that I have done during my thesis study has only provided me a small foundation to understand the visual world. They are at most a series of tests that attempt to bring together     aspects of the learned and felt visual worlds. As the soil from which to grow further work, these explorations help bridge my interest in the notion of seeing to my interest in dreams.

The images that we see now is different from the images that we saw when we were just born. Still, both are different from the images that we see in dreams.
When we were just born, we only saw colors and patterns. Later, we learn and associate certain things we see with particular meanings. When we are in a dream, the conventions of seeing that we have learned is once again broken. The logics of dimensionality, depth, sequence, and authenticity of objects are no longer intact.

Dreams provide the study of seeing with a softer referential structure than that of a mechanical one. Almost anything can happen in a dream because it is a simulated construction of imagination based on known associations that we have made up through experience.

In a way, surreal qualities we find in everyday life have to do with some kind of a breakage of existing seeing convention.

In the book “Theory of Prose”, Russian critic and writer Viktor Shklovsky discusses extensively the phrase “thinking in images”. This phrase evokes in me an attitude that constantly relates to the origin of things. As much as the phrase connotes a literal interpretation for a pictorial translation of thought, it also aspires to a metaphorical interpretation of a state of mind that’s primitive, or free of linguistic rationals.

Imagery was once as pure as sound and as atmospheric as temperature, only becoming complex through our processes of naming and categorization. I am interested in the transformation that happens when we comprehend, interact, and reshape parts of the things that exist in this world.

Our minds create abstracted notions in place of physical experience. As one grows in age, color shifts to become processed in the brain’s language centers instead of pre-linguistic parts. The gesture of editing and revising towards a certain objective tends to be a characteristic of the adult, as well as coincidentally any design work that intends to distill chaos into useful logic. I look to this phenomena as a source that leads to the     creation of dynamic imagery reading.

The notion of design suggests strong intention and purpose. It is a demonstration of intent rather than something that’s categorical physically. In this sense, the definition of graphic design is one that’s malleable. I am interested in the widest sense of graphic design, mainly as a process that defines visual relationships.

With the aid of graphic forms, ideas take shape in a specificity that can not exist otherwise. I am intrigued by the potential and personality of this specificity, and the effect it has as an     accompaniment to our natural day-to-day navigation. Rather than constructing absolute messages using visual conventions developed in the past,     I prefer to construct visual relationships and possibly create my own conventions.

While the notion of attention demands a     concentration of focus, the opposite of attention implies an awareness devoid of center—a state of anti or super attention or endless focii of equal importance. It is different from the notion of     inattention which is inattentive. I have tried to     understand these relationships through my explorations while looking for what drives the hierarchical ordering of visual activity.

I value states of wander, loose focus, and contradiction. I am interested in observing and exploring the implications of these tendencies. To me, this wish to diverge from any sort of singular attention is one that anticipates a fuller participation in the continuous stream of shifting.

I see the potential of graphic design as an     opportunity to stir up multiple points of visual entry in order to brings to life a dynamic reading that has not previously existed.

On projects 11, 14, 33, 13, 12, 15, and 16

My thesis began with the interest to see air as an object. We only notice air when our five senses have been disturbed. Yet we are seeing air and hearing air amongst the things that we see and hear; smelling and touching air amongst the things that we smell and touch. If air is an encompassing generalization just as fabric, mirrors, and toys are, I thought that it is possible to consider a defined mass of air an observable object, similar to a particular piece of fabric characterized by nuanced idiosyncrasies.

My first experimentation to present air was inspired by sound. First, I videotaped different classmates while whistling freely. Then I videotaped the same classmates whistling into seasoning bits and powders that I had prepared. I then edited the footage and linked together the different instances of whistling, which resulted to covered a range of forces and weight in motion. 11

Watching the video, I noticed how strong our tendency is to only see what is visible and moving. When we can’t visualize the air being affected, our attention is directed to the movements and efforts of the person whistling. It is only when the powders act as a visual aid making air partly visible, that our attention gets redirected to the shapes formed by the moving particles.

The quality of air suggests a physicality that is in a different sense than objects that we can hold. Although ungraspable, air possesses an extreme tension to us because we are dependent on it every second. The average person inhales about 40 liters of air per minute, and would completely die if deprived of air for six minutes.

Interested in visualizing this urgency, I tried to write, typewrite, color, and cut up things, all under six minutes. This was also an experiment for not having full control towards the end product of my work. 14

Not satisfied with the result, I came back to this idea again later. I calculated the volume of six minutes of air that a person breaths, which was about 2.4 cubic meters. So I looked for spaces which had the equivalent of this volume where I took videos that were each six minutes long. My intension was to collect as many videos of different spaces as possible and create a video collage. This project was incomplete because at a point it became overly didactic and repetitive. 33

I tried to think about air in different ways in order to understand the visual qualities that it suggests. If air had a color, we would be able to see how we are wrapped in this expansive substance that extends and fills all vacancies unless stopped by a perfectly sealed boundary. In a way, air is like negative space in a composition field.

In a type experiment, I took the counter shapes—or negative spaces—of the typeface Helvetica, and reconfigured these odd pointy shapes to imitate the original letter forms at their best. Because we are familiar with the shapes of alphabets, we have the ability to reposition the counter shapes back into the normal letter forms in our minds. 13

Like negative space, air is always presented to us in fractured occurrences and by the aid of another element. Containers give air visible shapes, but air is none of those shapes. Like the powders, they are containers or translators only capable of revealing a fragmented visual state of air’s qualities. Any attempt to close air in order to visualize its qualities is paradoxical because it lessens the awareness of the rest of the air that’s not contained.

I attempted to map the range of visual manifestations of air based on how we see air. The playlist collection starts with obvious examples, such as smoke, balloons, bottles, and gradually moves to the phenomenal ones, such as rainbow and bread holes. The very last example is a tree, being a symbol of an environment of how air is normally presented to us, all-surrounding but invisible. Then, I attempted to bring what is invisible to the foreground by making a reversal image, so that the areas of negative space that used to be white becomes black; the areas of images that used to be in color become white. While a better balance is achieved in terms of giving negative space more prominence, I realized that we are still unlikely to take the black area as primary because our vision gives dominance to shapes rather than flat colors. 12

Like negative space, it seems that air can only be seen and understood with effort, through metaphors, and probably more accurately, by imagination.

Unlike solid objects, air moves and transforms with the mixture of other particles. Trying to capture the subtlety of this shift, I took a series of photographs of the moving sky from the same position in five second intervals for six minutes. The static color of the sky as well as the shifting of an occasional passing cloud were recorded in a total of forty-five pictures.

With each image, I then zoomed into a single pixel at the same position to compare the change in color value exclusively. I created a book of blue pages that moves through the subtleties in the changing tones of the sky which is difficult to discern in our everyday view. The blue book became the first color book of a series of eight books in total. 15

The sky appears to be blue because of the light refraction that occurs as it enters the atmosphere. It is a false color representation of air or space beyond earth. I thought that the phenomena of seeing light is similar to the screen color technology of RGB. Trying to work with this analogy, I used the program Photoshop to split the color channels of my sky images into red, green, and blue, resulting in three times as much imagery than before. Then, I recombined two channels at a time under the RGB theory. Red and green produced a light yellow; green and blue produced a light blue, red and blue produced a light pink.

The combination of all three color channels produced white, so I made a white blank book in addition to the seven other ones as a response to express the difficulty of seeing air. The white book does not mean anything by itself. Its existence is only justified because of its relationship to the other books. 16

On projects 23, 3, 18, 8, 35, 26, 32, 29, 9, and 31

My initial inquiries into the notion of seeing concentrated narrowly on technology. Technology has always provided ways of seeing that depart from how we might naturally see something. It enhances our way of seeing by clearly dissecting and reorganizing an integrated view.

Close-ups, long distances, reverse images, fixed moments, multiple perspectives, slow motion, parallax views—the difference in appearance or position of an object when viewed from two different locations—are all examples of technologies that manipulate images.

Gavin Turk’s photograph entitled “Portrait of Something that I’ll Never Really See” depicts a portrait of himself with both eyes closed. It reminds me of the significance of visual manipulation provided by technology. In a drawing by 17th century mathematician and astronomer Christian Huygens, two perspectives of the planet Saturn orbiting around the sun co-exist in one image: the inner ellipse is the perspective seen from a birds-eye view while the outer images show the perspective as seen from earth. The drawing presents a view that could not truly be seen but Huygens was able to construct it by combining a knowledge of perspective drawing with the use of a telescope.

I made a poster exploring our comfort zones with scale. By filling an entire poster with 4 point type—the smallest scale readable—I was interested in creating a situation where it is necessary to stick one’s nose into the poster in order to read the words. Although the poster is still flat, a layer of physical awareness is heightened because of the viewer’s interaction with it.

With this poster as a my raw material, I generated two new posters that plays with the depth of field. The first one is simply a photograph taken very close to the 4 point type poster. The second one manipulates it using an effect filter from the program Photoshop. The computer generated lens effect is a more complex one and can not be produced with a camera. In the end, I marked the poster to emphasize the distortion that different depths of fields produced. 23

My interest to somehow join conflicting notions in order to explore how we see things was evident but not successful in an earlier project from first semester. I attempted to create an abstract system that embeds multiple photographs in order to seamlessly bridge two aspects of a bookstore site. I created various gradient patterns that can be used to reorganize photos according to their content, such as contrast in distance, color, inside-outside, etc. The crossover duality was an attempt to suggest that a bookstore offers a dimension of the imagination as well as a surface of graphical marks. The result was not successful because the system became overly imposed. 3

Comparisons help create multiple focuses in basic ways. For an interactive programming on the topic of weather, I created a program that plays an animation of the number of hours that the sun is up in the sky for a city. The size of the sun was determined by the particular temperature of that day. Later I realized that the animation created a visualized overview of time that forces us to see them as discrete units, different from the way we normally experience them. 18

Methods that extend our natural habits of looking always disrupt established conventions of seeing, which creates a shift of focus in multiple ways. Sometimes things are planned while other times things happen accidentally.

On a kindergarten building in Arizona, the sun discolored the upper tiles above the roof probably unexpectedly to the architect. As a result, the difference in the color shades quietly points the isolated building back to the natural world and reconnects it to the larger environment.

How we see things is largely dependent on the context that we put ourselves in when we try to understand what we see. Writings by Rob Roy Kelly discusses and explains how endless colors can be created simply by rearranging four basic colors. The process of building new colors out of old ones is similar to the process of enlarging our focus while knowing the start of it. As a didactic exercise that I made in my first semester, this animation helped me to see my interests in a metaphorical way. 8

Still interested in scale, I attached a convex mirror on the backside of a penny made of the same bronze material with assistance from sculptor Boris Chesakov. When held at arm distance, the distorted mirror reflects a smaller image of the holder, approximately the proportion of the relief image of Abraham Lincoln on the other side. By having a comparable static representation and a dynamic representation side by side, I intended to exaggerate the fact that representations are never isolated notions, but only an extension of what we already are. 26

Another idea to explore our physical orientation started with a house I made that always sits on its side. By making it so, I thought that the orientation of the house always refers to an axis different from the one that it is currently on. It can be on the same axis as another house at a different place of the world. This idea later developed into a proposal as painting installations on facades, but was physically too difficult to construct before the due date of this book. 35

A quick stamp project that I did takes the notion of scale literally. Because the stamp is physically a very small thing, I decided to make a stamp that reproduces a piece of my nail on it at actual size. 32

The notions of seeing can not be fully explored without the acknowledgement of the complexity of our multiple senses. Elements such as sound, memory, smell, and taste, just to name a few, open up a more intricate world of seeing, interpretation, and perception.

For a sculpture project, I wanted to take a look at the relationship between color and taste. I made a popsicle stick at human size to see if our correlation of a certain color to taste is still intact even though it is obviously deceiving by scale. In a way, this object confronts us to the visual information that we have accumulated, which proves to be arbitrary but at the same time very strong. 29

I was also interested in the difference between the way sound evokes weight in contrast to the way colors and shapes evoke weight. I took the form of the book to explore two things, the graphic translation of sound; and memory between the flipping of a book in comparison to remembering the melody by hearing. I made two books with different transparency paper on selected measures by musician Schoenberg to explore and suggest the different clarities in the process of remembering. This was also an old project and the process was very rigid. 9

While looking at books, I noticed that the transferring of weight of a book from the right hand to the left hand while one reads a book sequentially is never expressed visually. An idea I had was to color the odd (right) pages in a gradient from dark to light and color the even (left) pages in a gradient from light to dark; in order to make visible the physical feel of the book in one’s hand. This is also an unrealized idea because I thought that the idea is too singular and mathematical in expression. 31

I am not interested in analyzing existing technology or in developing new technologies of seeing. Rather, I would like to work in a way that confronts the personalities of image technologies, and by doing so, create work that draws inspiration from the differences in seeing that technology provides in contrast to our natural vision.

On projects 24, 34, 22, 25, 27, 10, 21, 30, and 28

Our eyes do not set. We track movements, colors, shapes. We sharpen and adjust our focus to see and follow what’s around us. Our natural attention is characterized with imperfection and spontaneity. A range of collections can be grouped by a didactic system, but it can also be grouped by a personal way of looking.

For example, in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French film “Amelie”, during a walk with the blind man, Amelie becomes an idiosyncratic lens to the outside world by pointing out and highlighting to him a number of lively happenings in the street. The film is also an extended filter of the director’s sequences of careful editing, which directs our attention to look at certain things.

In a demonstration in Tirana, Albania, demonstrators used pieces of mirrors to specifically direct people’s attention to the moving sky, expanding the viewers’ normal horizons. Similarly, clothing designed by Jessica Findley to be inflated by air forces us to take notice of the shapes they capture as cyclists ride around the world at various speeds under the wind.

I am interested in these ways of presenting fragments that allow the viewer to draw back the connections. In a publication project where we had to represent all seventeen of the students’ influence presentations, I asked each person to choose a favorite sentence from everyone else’s writing. Two collections of words were generated, each reflecting both the individual and the collective’s interests in an altered yet precise way. I then rearranged these to form concise versions of the presentations themselves, finding the concrete overlaps to be most interesting. 24

While this was an exercise in distillation and recombination to reflect people’s interests, I also had an unrealized idea that tried to distill color. Natural color always come in a shape that we associate it with. But manufactured color is more arbitrary in its application. I thought that a mapping of natural color in abstract shapes makes an interesting juxtaposition to a mapping of manufactured shapes in rainbow color—they can be any color. This project was not made because I envisioned it as an installation and it was too complex to produce. 34

As graphic designers, we work with paper. Most of the times, due to the nature of the projects, we use paper as containers that take the passive role for carrying other things. I was interested in finding some way to embed and reveal more dimension in paper alone.

First I want to represent the coexistence of different physical states of paper, states between paper and ash. So I burnt a piece of paper over the top of my stove. Dark round marks were made on the paper’s surface by pinching two ends together, creating a soft fold that absorbs the heat. After I laid the paper back flat again, I drewlines tracing the area of the approximate folds. I thought that this helps to trigger an image of the once folded state of the paper. 22

Traces lend themselves to a shift of focus by pointing to a previous state in history and revealing the instability of physical materials. Our ability to imagine a different state of an object goes hand in hand with our ability to imagine a volume in space, or to tell if a depiction of perspective is deceiving. All of these abilities are only possible by the fact that we have memory.

Memory seems to be directly linked with time and space. The idea of a trompe l’oeil takes advantage of our constructed visual knowledge to create a false eye, or a false perspective illusion of depth. Along similar lines, German painter Hans Holbein the Younger used the same understanding of perspective for his own purposes in the painting “The Ambassadors”—he hid an image of a skull as an anamorphic perspective drawing that becomes properly visible only if the viewer shifts their location in relation to the painting.

Marcel Duchamp’s “Anemic Cinema” has a similar effect as trompe l’oeil while in video. The two dimensional plane is given an allusion of three dimensional space by the factor of motion.

I was interested in exploring memory with video form. For three days, I made twenty-two attempts trying to duplicate the same walk by memory and capturing each on video. I became more skilled at each new attempt but never getting perfect. Every clip varies slightly from the others in movement and light conditions. The final video is comprised of the two of the video clips that were the closest to each other. Presented in a split screen format, two spaces reside in one frame which also heightens a strangeness that is different from our everyday experience. 25

I looked at the idea of controlled improvisation further with a book project that tried to reflect a collection of love stories. I thought that the stories all had a similar narrative curve of gaining, loosing, and vise versa. My idea was to perform something different but retain that curve. I filmed myself trying to hold my breath underwater for several times. The book then is made with the images and hidden folds for the viewer to discover the stories at moments of coming in or out of the water. 27

I aspire to the way animations have both enormous fluidity in image construction while weaving intricate narrative relationships. Among many, Caroline Leaf’s animation is especially intriguing in the rough but seamless transitions that she creates using experimental methods. It is as though time is interrupted with a personal rhythm in order to make us look at it better.

Inspired by her animations made with sand on a light table, I tried to make an animation in the same technique with flour during my first semester. I found that the material lends itself to the idea of morphing more than any other, and my animation became a two minute loose improvisation on the theme of play by smearing flour to create figures, shapes, and narratives. 10

Our minds do not just see what is in front of us. It tries to make more with what we see. In the film “Zorn’s Lemma”, Hollis Frampton demonstrates our ability to shift and create meaning even within a changing visual system. Through a sequence of filmed scenarios, he implies that the original form of the alphabet set is as arbitrary as the set that he has replaced, which consists of recorded actions and situations.

Artist group Oho once created an installation of a specific arrangement of lit candles in a grass field to imitate the star constellation of the sky that day. The symbolic connotation makes us aware of our tendency for association.

Somewhat by accident, I began creating a set of letter forms by cutting pre-folded paper. Each alphabet has a range of variations based on the alternation in the foldings. Because folds create mirrored shapes, the idiosyncrasies of each alphabet is revealed through the inconsistencies of symmetrical elements. An infinite number of variations can be created that fall in the gray area of readability. 21

Later, I began to relate these letter forms to the forms of a human body, as if trying to release the alphabets’ inherent imagery potentials for rebuilding a visual language of its own. I spelled out different words and linked them into an animated film. The film becomes a chain of words that describes joints, residues, and emotions. 30

For an interactive project, I filled a browser page with transparent roll-over hot spots that trigger changes in the background image. I was able to create a situation where there is no assigned beginning or ending. The photographs waiting to be activated on the stage consists of different states and instances of the same subject, the acorn. Thus, each casual twirl of the mouse animates a slightly different sequence of image combination impossible to determine beforehand. 28

Interested in exploring the notion of rereading and non-linear reading, I found that the means of the web browser interface offers a platform that has inherent in it the quality of shifting.

(Video: Watch this video on the post page)