Projection02 week01
Reflection on Audience Engagement
Can we challenge Japanese society’s pursuit of perfection by highlighting the beauty and expressive potential of distorted typefaces?
My focus from the feedback is on the knowledge and communication approach on the theme. I started my journey from the visual effect of distortion and arrived at the beauty of imperfection in Japanese culture. According to Sueyoshi (2020), the idea of distortion is included in the idea of imperfect beauty in Japan. However, I can see that my project gradually shifted from a perspective of distortion to a perspective of imperfect beauty. In this term, I will develop the project by focusing on imperfect beauty, slightly widening the focus from distortion. This is because I use Okakura’s (1961) The Book of Tea as my main reference, and the Japanese tea ceremony and imperfect beauty are very much related. Concepts such as Wabi-sabi, which is the idea of leaving things unfinished or incomplete, and philosophy such as Kintsugi, which sees value in imperfect beauty, also come from the Japanese tea ceremony culture and are representative examples of imperfect beauty. By incorporating these concepts into the project, I believe that I can find a new approach to my line of enquiry which is ‘Can we challenge Japanese society’s pursuit of perfection by highlighting the beauty and expressive potential of distorted(imperfect) typefaces?’
About the communication part, a major barrier is the language issue. As my project uses Japanese letters, my work also needs to be explained in English to non-Japanese speakers. This means I need to further explore ways of presenting my work itself in an understandable way, even if people can not read Japanese. My initial plan was to use my clay typeface to create a type specimen, that is why I made a publication to support my idea and explain my work in English at the same time but I will also consider whether to further develop this publication, or use other media such as video, or create another easy-to-understand visual in this term. At this moment, I am not currently thinking of making my clay letters into functional digital characters. I use Xu Bing’s Gravitational Arena (2022) as my reference because it challenges his created work not to function as a readable text, but to ‘provoke contemplation on the tensions, interactions and wrestling-like relationships between different civilisations’ through the medium of letters. Similarly, I am using letters as a medium in an exploration to convey imperfect beauty, and the functionality of these letterforms as letters is of little importance in my project. Therefore, I will be examining ways of presenting visuals in this term regarding the way Xu’s work is presented.
I do not see it as a problem that I can not show my physical work directly to my main audience, many of whom are in Japan. I believe as long as I think carefully enough in showing my work online, I can deliver my message anywhere in the work with the internet. I think my clay type work has been completed to some extent, and now I need to consider whether the work itself needs to be changed or whether the way the work is presented needs to be changed in order to communicate well with my audience.