'Birdcage Carpets.'
'This is Not a Love Letter', exhibition.
Flyer Project Seoul Curated by Binna Choi - Maronnier Art Center, Thursday 5 - Sunday 22 August 2004
For this project, twelve visual artists and designers each created a flyer design to be randomly inserted into daily newspapers.
In Korea flyers are a highly popular medium for commercial advertising. The flyer, then, is popular among advertisers but
notorious among readers. However artistic and appealing they seem in nature and design, when they are delivered, Trojan
horse-like, they are perceived as deceitful and intrusive. What is more: there are simply too many of them. This very love-hate
relationship brought artists and designers together who read flyers as rich texts for the urban situation and its rich social
cultural content. Eight flyers were designed, using all different sorts of visual rhetoric. The flyer, when it is not immediately
discarded, may possibly trigger a critical view of reality in the attentive reader (one in five hundred on average) that generates
interaction and encounters. Like a love letter, the flyer is sent carefully and secretly; perhaps some reader will sense the
essential pleasure it captures.
Double bind is conceptually specific for Manuel Raeder’s design works. They have two incompatible requests that lead to two
different forms of consciousness. It seems a negation that is primarily proclaimed. That leaves you with nothingness. However,
on another side, and probably at a deeper level, you can find multiple layers of sense within conceptual framework and also
beyond. Therefore point of conflict turns out to be a positive source that can make your sensual and intellectual experience in
his works more intensive.
For the flyer project Manuel Raeder designed a circular shaped paper that was produced in three different colors. Nothing is
written on it and with it. This circular shape becomes odd in the context where the flyer is actually placed, that is between
newspaper and flyers, especially when the others are unexceptionally rectangular standing for efficiency. The basic idea of this
flyer came from the use of it as bird carpet. Yet, in the project it suggests all possible usages improvised by the receivers
themselves: children can draw on it, housekeeper wraps stuff with it, students uses it as mouse pad, anything is open to you.
Binna Choi.
Among the participating artists were Haegue Yang, Yangachi, Manuel Raeder, Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum,
Joeng Hwa Choi, Pidgin Girok, Flatmess, Min Choi and Sulki Choi.