SEVEN EXHIBITION（Poster）
This is a poster series that I made for the “Seven Exhibition” held in April, 2005 in Hong Kong, and it is based on a piece of mine that was published in the German magazine “032c” in 2004. When Joerg Koch, the magazine’s creative director, gave me the theme “outside and inside,” the idea that instinctively came to my mind was what I had always thought of as being the most passe of motifs, a rose. During production, Koch suggested that I would use Rilke’s poem “Inside the Rose.” When I read the translated poem and got to know more about Rilke and the background of the piece, I felt a shift of perception. As a result, this work became my first challenge into the world of “beauty and sensuality” — something that I had been avoiding until then. Ever since, I’ve been making pieces based on the rose theme.
Each of the 100 posters that we printed had holes in them at random locations. These holes were made one by one, using a punch and guided only by my mood.
I drew the red shapes in the posters only three times using a ball-point pen. It takes a lot of courage to use only a few strokes to make a drawing now, because with computers, it is so easy to modify your work to the nth degree. I love this technology but I am not always sure it is a good thing. Is this an uncompromising attitude?
This work is my response to this trend and represents my view of typography as of this moment.
