OKNP Busan invites the typography master, Ahn Sang-soo(Nalgae), to hold a solo exhibition titled “Be Spellbound.” Ahn Sang-soo is an artist who has been showing new senses by building his own formative language based on letters such as “Hangeul.”

He is widely known as a typographer and designer who designed the de-squared “typeface Ahn Sang-soo”(1985) based on the principles of invention contained in the Hunminjeongeum Haerye. However, Ahn Sang-soo’s world did not just settle in design. It is because his experimentation with letters crosses the boundary between art and design along with various media such as paintings, sculptures, installations, and media. He has held large-scale solo exhibitions such as the “Imagining Hangul” (2002) at the Rodin Gallery, the former of the Leeum Museum of Art, the invited exhibition of the Gutenberg Award-winning Leipzig HGB(2007), and the “Nalgae.PaTI”(2017) at the Seoul Museum of Art. Also, he has established himself as an artist by participating in major overseas exhibitions such as the “Tokyo Biennale”(Tokyo, 2021), “Korean in Color” (San Diego Museum of Art, 2023), and “Guangzhou Triennial”(Guangdong Museum of Art, 2023). In fact, such a move has not just started recently. Since the 1980s, when he began his career in full-fledged, he has held solo exhibitions, which is rare for designers, making his name known as an artist, and has been close to the artists who are said to have opened Korean Postmodernism, such as Lee Bul and Choi Jeong Hwa, and has consistently released artworks through various exhibitions. Kim Hong-hee (former director of the Seoul Museum of Art) commented on him, who is not trapped in a certain frame but is extensively crossing the art and design industries, “Getting a glimpse of his character, who is not stereotyped and not influenced by established values, I had an intuition that he was the avant-garde of this era. From the artistic actions and attitudes of life he showed, I found the true avant-garde.”

This solo exhibition of Ahn Sang-soo, “Be Spellbound,” consists of a series of “Munjado, Letter Works” that Ahn has continuously worked on since 2017. “Be Spellbound,” collected by major art museums in Korea, such as the Seoul Museum of Art and the Amorepacific Museum of Art, is a drawing created by combining the Korean character, dat-ja, and folk paintings; in other words, Munjado. “Be Spellbound” is an image made of letters, but because each letter is disassembled to recombine, it cannot be read as a letter when faced in person. However, we, who are accustomed to reading letters, try to read them, and through this activity, we countlessly cross between “meaning and meaninglessness.” This is the beauty of appreciating Munjado. Ahn makes us face the senses we feel, facing abstraction, more actively by using letters. In addition, the existence of the consonant “ㅎ” also drives moving “between phonation and silent.” In response, art critic Sae-mi Cho said, “The image shapes revealed in this series commonly contain the characteristics of sensory perception elements. However, rather than integrating sensory perception into a comprehensive system, it is shown as a concept of a passage for communicating and exchanging each other in a situation where each element preserves its original characteristics. It’s like a communicating vessel, a scientific experimental tool in which two or more tubes are connected in the center for liquids on both sides to penetrate each other and achieve the same height and density.

The exhibition’s title, “Be Spellbound,” was taken from the work. The artist says that he is “a person who is spellbound by Hangeul.” Also, about all the aesthetic achievements he has achieved, he says, “It was possible because he was spellbound.” Starting with this exhibition, the artist said he would start his work activities in earnest. This will also be possible because he is spellbound by something. The Munjado “Be Spellbound” is also a series that penetrates the essence of Ahn Sang-soo’s aesthetics. In addition, as mentioned, the work also represents the way of life he has lived. The Munjado “Be Spellbound,” presented this time, stands out for its bolder shape and combination than earlier works. “Be Spellbound,” which reminiscences kaleidoscopes, shows that he is not just combining letters but reconstructing them through various experiments. In addition, the unique matière compositions using graphite materials that were not used before stand out. All of these suggest that Ahn Sang-soo worked with the attitude of a child playing with the letters that they do not understand. I hope the exhibition will become an opportunity to face what Ahn Sang-soo has been spellbound with in his life.