Accolade for Ahn Sang-Soo Gutenberg Prize 2007 Dr.

Stefan Soltek

For the few of you who are not familiar with the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach, I would like to add to my thanks for the honour of paying tribute to Ahn Sang-Soo, a brief mention of the fact that the Museum is indeed fertile ground from which to speak in praise of calligraphy. Karl Klingspor personified a feeling for the quality in the design of a typeface and he developed an inimitable sixth sense for typeface as a functional code, not to be treated statically, but all the more effective in its design, the better it simulates the expressive variety of a text. Many works demonstrate how the spectrum of both past and future in society between 1900 and 1930 was also specifically and eloquently expressed in the use of type. To this day, that period makes clear how in just a few years, a few decades, the polarity between a retrospective and an innovative world view is reflected in varying forms of typeface. It is the reason why specific types are not just continuities for specific subject-matter, but why it is important from time to time to revisit and record anew these different basic configurations. In designer circles, it is still said to this day that it is easier for the Japanese to create an effect with their script. In fact, the pictorial quality that flows from the brush does emerge in its own way in the Chinese kanji, hirgana and katagana characters respectively. And all the more as their mix produces a living contrast - script becomes a filigree latticework in the flow of lines, sketched out by hand with the tool and characteristic style of the painter. I am not sure that an outsider would see anything comparable in Latin alphabet type would be able to point to letters in upper and lower case, to roman, grotesque and Old English type and their combination if applicable. Korean is visibly different from both that is, from Japanese (and Chinese) and Latin script and typeface. Hangul can be translated as "superior script". It is the later term for "hunmin chong-um", or "popular" script and came about as an independent alphabet replacing the socalled ideo system as a way of writing Korean which had been based on Chinese. King Sejong introduced the new script in the mid 15th century, prepared by a committee of scholars assigned to the task. Its peculiarity is that its characters are not arbitrary, functioning at random in relation to articulation, but that they include markings for articulation characteristics. Harald Haarmann has noted: "The graphic repertoire of hangul clearly reflects an elementary experimental-phonetic principle which is original to Korean. The visual appearance () of

the characters is designed by their creator to illustrate the basis for the articulation of certain sounds. Concepts are also taken from Chinese cosmology. The trinomial differentiation of vowel characters represents the division into three made up of heaven (spherical), earth (horizontal) and man (vertical)." The graphic characteristic of hangul became particularly clear to me some years ago when I was involved in producing a catalogue in German and Korean, designed by Uwe Loesch who can be mentioned here, not just as a significant typographer, but a good friend of Ahn's as well. What constitutes this difference in Korean script technically speaking? On the one hand: in its individual letters and words, always the same height and based on the square, it ties itself into scarcely separate linear currents of movement. This is a factor that Ahn has carefully exploited into typographic compositions and reshaped into series of characters. His writing, in which each word is followed by a full stop or point, is part of this principle of uninterrupted, staccatoregulated sequencing of information, provoking graphic confusion and evoking reflection of linguistic structure. Onomatopoeia as graphic discipline, blending rhythmic looking and hearing in a single sensory perception, is the subtle achievement that is inherent in Ahn Sang-Soo's statement. A second factor distinguishing hangul can be described in simple terms as the dominance on the one hand of the right angle and on the other of the round or square or right-angle-enclosed shape. Both elements give hangul script a clarity and stringency of captivating lucidity. If it is true that Korean thinking is highly exact and unambiguous, this explains the characteristics of the script and type as matching this. Perhaps it can be described as a virtually dipolar, indeed quasi digital appearance, giving the script a so pointed proximity to our contemporary notion of layout in line with systematic reproduction and the variation of basic conditions. The fact that an archaic method appears at the same time, could also be linked to the notion of timelessness. Does Korean culture stand for a particular emphasis on continuity? In his work, Ahn demonstrates an unmistakeable ability to delineate the elementary. And to distill from a single element the elementary, because in its occasional representation, it reveals its essentials. What is it more than one such elementary, bipolar "hangul gesture" when Ahn gets his fellow humans in unison to hold a flat hand over an eye. Two become one. The one curve. The standard human becomes a Cyclops, reality the myth. The single ocular sphere, the one verticle hand, emphasising the right angle of the nose and forehead. Sphere and right angle in this gesture, the elements of

hangul script become "visible". And all those who in their hundreds have posed for his camera like this, when stored in his database, make up the human realisation of the detailed tension apparent in his typography. Ahn an anthropologist who experiences typeface and brings it to life?! Well, this is no more than speculation and he may not have seen it that way when he began his huge communication project. My observation ventures to articulate the magic that emanates from his handling of the characters, knowing full well how great the difference, the approach must remain. It is an attempt to say that whoever creates design form in the field of the written, and receives the Gutenberg Prize, is being assured that "beauty" in the German (as well) sense of the word, must combine with something "true", if the judgement of "good" is to follow. Ahn finished his college education in 1977 and began as an advertising designer in PR work. There followed work as art director for magazines such as Ma-dang and Meot in 1983 and led him to configure his Ahn type in 1985, entirely influenced by the understanding that type was "the natural skeleton and basic structure" of design work. He was the chief editor of the campus magazine at Hong-Ik University, enjoying both the journalism and the demands of design which took him to different printing works and introduced him to the handling of moveable typefaces. The world of typeface opened up to him more and more, in a complexity that does not usually concern many people in the world of graphic design. Practical application outweighed theoretical know-how as it gained in significance for Ahn. An important moment for Ahn was the discovery of a book that was to preoccupy him deeply. In a bookshop in Seoul's Jong-ro district, he came across the English translation of Jan Tschichold's "Die Neue Typographie" ("The New Typography") from 1928, when its author was just 26 years old. Ahn found out all he could about European typography. Tschichold's description of "New Typography" was an eye-opener for him, particularly with the examples it introduced. His creed of combining a new aesthetics of the machine age with an agreeable reading form, and aiming in the process for a harmonious organism, also influenced the reader Ahn Sang-soo. It was the creed of the modern age, in architecture and object design, of the twenties and thirties, postulated by Tschichold for typeface too, and for Ahn in the eighties, it was still of interest in showing the way forward. So it is not surprising, that in 1980, he published a translation of the Tschichold text "Asymmetrical Typography" in book form in the magazine Ggumim. This was what shaped Ahn the theoretician, someone who could say with conviction: innovation can only follow the acceptance of criteria.

A key concept for Ahn, in English "typeness" (cf. madness), conveys understanding and feeling for the form of the letters. From this, Ahn found his way to the formulation of characters which allows for the basic lettering motif to lead on into an overarching significance. It is only logical that in the process, the composition of the individual character and its relationship to the neighbouring character and to the face area, signifies the expanse of its appearance. And this is what is so decisive in Ahn's work. These fundamental contemplations, undertaken by him with great sensitivity, create the lightness with which he measures the axis of sense and sight between what can be read and can be visually unearthed, so that the observer who accepts his approach and views his graphic evocation, is led on to a truly effective enlightenment. This is how his installations function, stylised into graphic design on the basis of typography, as do his books and posters when, from their internalised punctuation, they achieve a realisation that also (after all) seems simply readable. What helps him here is the masterly use of means of representation, be it the fields of the letters, the linear sequences of letters and the similar shaping elements, be it the rapport of geometrising subjects to ornamental bands or the gesture of the brushwork that returns to tradition in generously covering and bringing space to life. Ahn has at his disposal an astonishing repertoire of expression which is stimulated as much by the past history of design, as it is also fed by the language of postconstructivist contemporaries in digital graphics, graffiti and street art, with the scattering of particles, indeed of pixels. One thing he never loses in the process: himself. His language is unmistakably that of a designer personality who appreciates his cultural background and brings to it a new profile. One of his wonderful projects (1997), a kind of declination and metamorphosis of the circle character, bears the enchanting title: "once.upon.a.time.,words.were.stars.. when.they.took.on.meaning.,they.fell.to.earth."