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PLAYFUL TYPOGRAMS

The Chinese writing system consists of over 50,000 different characters that not only include nouns but also concepts and vocabulary. Looking at using typographic elements as text and imagery, this poster series was about revisiting and experimenting with Chinese and Western linguistic concepts. Play was a key underlying principle of the series.

PROJECT INFO

FOCUS

Typography

CLIENT

DATE

June 2021

BRIEF

Looking at using typographic elements as text and imagery, this poster series was about revisiting and experimenting with Chinese and Western linguistic concepts. How can the meanings of Chinese characters and phrases be interpreted through playful visual explorations?

ORIGINS

Dating back about 5,000 years, Chinese characters, known as 漢字 (Hanzi) are one of the earliest forms of written language in the world. They are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. Over the years, they have evolved to include various styles and scripts from oracle bone inscriptions to modern simplified characters.

Some of the characters originated from pictographs, whilst others are part of a more sophisticated system where each graph or character corresponds to one meaningful unit of the language.

BACK TO THE ROOTS

It has been nine years since I left Hong Kong and moved out to various cities in Europe, most recently being Berlin. After living here for 3 years, English and German have became a normal everyday conversation — what used to be my native language, alongside English, has now faded into rusty, broken fragments.

This ongoing project is a revisit and continuous exploration of the language, as well as the cultural experiences I have had growing up in Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai.